Ecuadorian opposition seeks second round | …

From Quito

Ecuador awaits Sunday’s electoral race, which will be decisive for the next few years in the country. Each of the three leading candidates on Thursday closed their electoral rallies in their places of political origin: Andrés Arauz in Quito, Guillermo Lasso in Guayaquil, Yaku Pérez in Cuenca. This order of preferences is the one that the majority of surveys have shown in recent weeks. We know, there are margins of error, phenomena such as the hidden vote, percentages of undecided voters and political calculations that can mark some polls in a scenario where the debate is whether or not there will be a second round.

One conclusion emerges from all pollsters: if there is indeed a vote, which would take place on April 11, it would be between Arauz and one of the two candidates who follow him. According to current figures, there is no possible second round against Lasso and Pérez, second and third in the polls.

Lasso is a prototype figure of the Latin American right: a banker, enriched by the crisis of 1999 when his declared assets of one million dollars rose to 31 million, while millions of Ecuadorians became impoverished and emigrated. from the country. He is associated with 49 companies located in tax havens and is director of the Ecuador Libre Foundation, which is part of the Atlas network, in which a large part of the Latin American and Spanish right is united, with terminals in the United States. .

Perhaps his relationship and projection with the United States is the only issue in the campaign in which he is speaking clearly. In response to his policy of international relations, he declares: “We are going to approach countries like the United States, historically it is our main friend, we use their currency. When Ecuadorians want to travel, they want to go to the United States first, when they want to study, they mainly go to the United States, when things go wrong in Ecuador, they want to live in the United States, a country of opportunities. It is our main trading partner, we will seek a free trade agreement ”.

Lasso produced a speech of electoral promises that comes little close to the neoliberal program he seeks to advance: women’s economic empowerment, gender parity, free education, drinking water, sanitation, salary increases from $ 400 to $ 500, two million jobs and a vaccination plan for nine million people in the first hundred days. His government plan, however, is different. It has, for example, among its central points a reform of the labor code, as well as the repeal of the Constitution of 2008.

As for the citizen revolution, its attack rests on two central axes. First, take the fake news from Magazine week, from Colombia, where it was claimed that Arauz’s campaign received funding from the Colombian National Liberation Army. Second, an attack on 21st century socialism which, according to Lasso, has been in the country for 14 years, that is to say under the two terms of Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno, despite, in the latter case, their explicit shift towards a neoliberal program.

It is in the critique of the Correa and Moreno governments that the speeches of Lasso and Pérez are publicly found. The candidate of the Pachakutik party, founded in the 1990s by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), argues that the governments of the citizens’ revolution were “the decade of plunder instead of the decade won”.

The distance between CONAIE and Correísmo is not new, which was expressed recently, for example, in the indigenous and popular uprising of October 2019 before the attempt to execute an adjustment plan by Moreno as part of the agreement with the Fund. International monetary. On this occasion, the leaders of CONAIE, who carried out violently repressed demonstrations, showed an open confrontation with the correismo which was expressed at the negotiating table between the indigenous movement and Moreno.

Lasso, with a neoliberal deepening project, and Pérez, who presents himself as a leader of popular extraction, left, indigenous, with an emphasis on the environmental dimension, are then the second and third forces in dispute during the elections of Sunday. Polls indicate that one of the two would go to a poll, if necessary. Lasso said he would support Pérez in the event that he reached the second round, a message to which the candidate Pachakutik responded by distancing himself, but without specifying what his position would be if Lasso reached the second round.

The other option for Sunday, which is on the table, is a first-round victory for Arauz, which the citizen candidate for the revolution claims can happen, for which he is expected to reach 40% of the vote with a 10-point gap on the second. .