Carlos Mora
Journalist and Secretary General of EditoRed
Believe me. The most important thing about Election Day in Ecuador is not who made it to the second round. For me, the most important thing is that while we waited for the results at the close of voting, we had coffee with my parents and siblings, we laughed at some family joke, we planned the next meeting, we wished each other a good rest of the day.
We were not, of course, the only family in such conditions. We were not the only ones who lived this crucial day in peace, in complete tranquillity. The news we talked about had nothing to do with which polling station was violated, which candidate was threatened or attacked during the day, who was claiming fraud, where there were bombs, in which prison there was a riot… Believe me. The most important thing was that peace won.
And in that atmosphere, voters gave multiple and important messages. Going to the polls en masse was the main one. At a time of heightened insecurity in the country, one that is already considered the most violent in the region, after the recent assassinations of elected officials, following an assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio… 82% of voters turned out to vote.
There was fear. But it was overcome with votes.
How to interpret the results?
The candidate Luisa González, of the Citizen’s Revolution movement, led by former president Rafael Correa, won the first round with 33% of the votes. An unexpected name will accompany her on the final ballot: Daniel Noba, of the alliance known as ADN, came second with 24%.
Before the short election campaign began, the country was unaware of these two names. Both had just been members of the Assembly (deputies), but they did not figure in the national political debate. How did they manage to be the ones who on 15 October next year will be contesting the Presidency of Ecuador?
A strong party
Luisa González has the votes of the consolidated correísmo. This is her strength, but also, so far at least, her limit: in the last election, the correista candidate (Andrés Arauz on that occasion) obtained a very similar percentage of votes in the first round. In the second round, he lost to Guillermo Lasso, the president who brought forward the elections and who will leave power in November or December of this year.
So a lot of people have given another important message there. They tend to support a structured movement, with bases throughout the country, with organisation and ideology. Surely the support for Correism also has a lot of clientelism, but it is clear that Revolución Ciudadana has a solid electorate, which supports an organisation with a defined discourse, with a clear tendency and with connections beyond national borders.
A crucial crime and a crucial debate
And Noboa is undoubtedly a surprise. True, he may have inherited the political and social capital harvested by his father, businessman Álvaro Noboa, five-time presidential candidate for a party that no longer exists, the richest man in the country. But the vast majority of voters learned of that background and affiliation on Sunday 13 August.
On that day, the presidential debate took place between seven of the eight candidates, an exercise that is mandatory under Ecuadorian law. One was missing: Fernando Villavicencio, who had been assassinated after leaving a rally just four days earlier, on 9 August. His replacement, Christian Zurita, was not allowed to participate in the debate. His candidacy was only approved on Wednesday 16 August, one day before the official end of the election campaign.
And that assassination was the brutal and bloody event that changed everything in this election. A crime from which the public expressed another powerful message to politicians, as seen in yesterday’s results. And that message is that it is fed up with violence, that it no longer tolerates it, in any form. They can no longer tolerate the criminal violence of the narco, but neither can they tolerate the verbal violence of the politician, who only finds in fighting, in confrontation, the way to represent the citizenry. The people make it clear that they prefer someone who gives them hope for a country that recovers peace, but who does so with schools and jobs, and not just with guns and tanks.
It is true that in the midst of the mourning there was a tendency to support, on the one hand, the one who had set himself up as the warrior candidate, who would fight the narco with military vehemence. This was Jan Topic, an outsider who climbed to first place in the polls after the Villavicencio crime. On the other hand, there was a tendency to back the heir to the murdered candidate’s struggle.
But, in the midst of that, the debate took place. And in it, 35-year-old Daniel Noboa was the winner. And not because he was the one who offered more soldiers and more police and more tanks, not because he offered to fight Correaism, the corrupt of the current and former governments… He won because he was calm, respectful, clear. Because he did not fight, he did not attack anyone. He tried to talk about his plan and tried to give importance in his speeches not only to the issue of security (as Topic did, especially) but also to employment, higher education, justice… He thus appeared before the people as a young face and a new voice, far from the tragicomic tradition of confrontational political debate in Ecuador.
Young people, as always, back change
In the days following the debate, Noboa tried to continue in the same line, relying on social networks and his styles to curry favour with the country’s largest electorate: young people, who represent 50% of all those who must go to the polls in Ecuador.
And so, as always happens in any election, the people backed what implied a change, in this case, of style and subject matter.
And perhaps that is why Christian Zurita did not make it to the second round. Because although he was the replacement for the murdered candidate, a crime that aroused much indignation, much solidarity and earned Villavicencio/Zurita a great deal of national and international recognition, he certainly also represented a confrontational candidacy, the fiercest political rival of Correism. The indignant and condolence vote took Zurita to third place in this election, with 16%, when before the assassination the polls gave Villavicencio as high as fifth place.
Zurita pushed Topic to fourth place, with 14%, and pushed former vice-president Otto Sonnenholzner, who was thought to be in the second round, down to fifth place, with 7%.
Incidentally, there was another message from the electorate: they do watch the debates, they do care, they are interested in politics. It is true that the assassination may have put people more in tune with the big national issues, but the fact that 80% of the population watched the presentation of the candidates, and another 13% tried to find out about it in the following days, according to published polls, is no minor statistic.
A more consolidated assembly
The people also seem to have learned another lesson, as seen in the votes. The current president, Guillermo Lasso, had the grace of winning the presidency and the misfortune of not winning a large bloc of deputies. He was unable to manage this serious political difficulty and ended up cornered by an adverse National Assembly (Congress) focused on the particular interests of the parties and their caudillos and owners.
This time, the electorate was more coherent. The main winners in the Assembly are the parties of those who won the first three places in the presidential elections. Correism will continue to be the first minority, but there will be a very important representation of Construye, the movement that backed Fernando Villavicencio/Zurita. ADN will be the third force in the legislature.
What will the second round be like?
Politics is unpredictable. Last night, after the results were announced, we witnessed an unusual parade: one by one, the candidates made their pronouncements. No one claimed fraud, no one spoke disparagingly of an opponent; the defeated accepted defeat, and the winners spoke of their approaches to the second round. One detail: the winning candidate thanked the Revolución Ciudadana movement, but, at least in her main speech, she did not name Rafael Correa, the leader who bases his political actions on confrontation, on fighting.
Could it be that this conciliatory and democratic tone is being maintained? It is impossible to know. Tomorrow another tragic event could occur and everything will once again revolve around security. Or the dirty campaign will be activated and the two finalists will engage in a war of accusations. Either the mastermind of the assassination will be discovered and that will either leave one candidacy in a bad light or clear it of all suspicion.
What is clear is that González and Noboa must work on making themselves known. According to the measurements, there are 40% of voters who do not know much about them, least of all about their proposals.
González, in her thank-you speech, did not name Correa but emphasised again and again her womanhood and thanked her fellow women for their support. Will she focus on expanding the women’s vote? Right now, her male and female electorates are similar. In fact, Noboa’s female electorate is larger (by three percentage points) than his male electorate.
Noboa, for his part, spoke again and again about young people and how their support was important for the result he obtained. Will he concentrate on consolidating and expanding that youth vote? Perhaps he should also think about getting the indigenous vote, which is young and ecological, based on a very developed political and social structure, identified with the left.
How will he get the vote of those who do support more warlike measures against organised crime, those who voted for Topic?
How will he do all this if in his first public speech after the elections he said he did not think it necessary to make coalitions with any of the other parties that contested the elections?
The final candidates will have to understand the moment, they will have to thoroughly understand the messages that the brave Ecuadorian people are giving us, the people who decided to go out and vote in the most fearful moment in living memory, which was precisely the moment when the greatest courage was needed to support democracy and peace.
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