August 20, 2023. The people of Ecuador went to the polls to elect a new president, just two years after the 2021 elections. Citizens’ Revolutionary Party candidate Luisa Gonzalez finished ahead in the first round of elections with 33% of the votes. But since no candidate received enough votes to win in the first round, the president will be determined in a runoff election in October.
Gonzalez will compete with Daniel Noboa, the candidate of the center-right National Democratic Action Party, who received 24 percent of the votes in the first round in the October election.
Luisa Gonzalez’s party was founded after the Country Alliance founded by former socialist president Rafael Correa was disgraced by its successor, Lenin Moreno. Moreno, who first served as Correa’s vice president and then was elected as his replacement, betrayed both his party and the voters who gave him this authority by shifting to the right as soon as he took office.
This betrayal includes the austerity agreement with the IMF and the arrest of his own former comrades. Correa himself lives in exile in Belgium over a trumped-up accusation of alleged election spending. Moreno left the presidency with the lowest approval rating in modern Ecuadorian history, and even though he was eligible, he did not seek re-election.
The South American country’s presidential elections would normally take place in 2025. But early elections had to be called after President Guillermo Lasso approved the constitutional provision dissolving the national assembly.
During the process that led to the resignation of Lasso, a former banker and leader of the right-wing CREO party, following various accusations of corruption and abuse of power, his approval rating fell below 15 percent. It can be said that he used his constitutional authority to avoid embarrassing consequences such as dismissal or even punishment.
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