The challenges of the Andean region on the road to superdom …

This Sunday, the elections will take place in Ecuador and Peru, and the second round in some departments of Bolivia. Chile, for its part, has decided to postpone the elections which were to be held this weekend, to May 15 and 16, due to the health situation caused by covid-19.

Ecuadorians go to the polls again in the second round to elect the President and Vice President of the Republic for the period 2021-2025. On February 7, the Andrés Arauz-Carlos Rabascall formula of Unión por la Esperanza obtained 32.72% compared to the formula of Guillermo Lasso-Alfredo Borrero, Alianza Creo-PSC, with 19.74, after a period of uncertainty and allegations of fraud in the face of the short difference between second and third place with candidate Yaku Pérez.

This second round takes on greater relevance in terms of respect for democratic institutions, after all the instances of prosecution, such as the resolutions and requests of the Office of the Comptroller General of the State or the resolutions of the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation which hampered the work. CNE., and external interventions, such as the arrival of the Attorney General of Colombia to meet with his Ecuadorian counterpart following a false accusation of funding that Arauz allegedly received from the Colombian National Liberation Army.

The main challenge for whoever will be elected next Sunday stems from the results of the assembly elections, due to the number of votes received by political forces such as Pachakutik and Izquierda Democrática, who could not go to the second round, but whose electoral flow no political force has its own majority in the National Assembly. In this context, the search for agreements and consensus with other political forces is essential not only to achieve governability, but also to be able to reverse the health, social and economic crisis in which the country finds itself after the government of Lenin Moreno.

Peru is in the home stretch of the electoral campaign to elect the President of the Republic, its two vice-presidents, 130 deputies and 5 Andean parliamentarians for the period 2021-2026, in a very turbulent political context.

In the last period, four presidents passed through the Presidency of the Republic: Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Martín Vizcarra, Manuel Merino – who resigned less than a week after taking office – and the legislator Francisco Sagasti, who has eventually elected by Congress as interim president until this year’s election. Let us also remember just over a year ago, in January 2020, extraordinary elections to Congress were held after the dissolution of Congress by then-President Vizcarra, which resulted in the consolidation of the dispersion of the party system.

Today, a few days before the elections, and with 18 presidential candidates, the polls show a scenario of strong fragmentation of the vote, which will result not only in a highly atomized Congress, but also in the realization of a second round that would take place. to June 6 if, as evidenced by the intention to vote, none of the candidates manages to exceed fifty percent.

A sample of this is seen in the minimum difference between the candidate with the highest voting intention, Yohny Lescano, of the historic Popular Action party, and who is in sixth place, there is less than a five percent difference. Among those who find themselves in these early places are also Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former president, who was a presidential candidate in 2011 and 2016, managing to reach the second round of these elections; Rafael López Aliaga, a far-right hotel businessman, described by some as “El Bolsonaro de Perú”, a millionaire, an extremist with authoritarian and anti-rights discourse; Hernando de Soto, a 79-year-old right-wing economist responsible for Alberto Fujimori’s economic shock policies, who has risen in recent polls saying he will let in “neither the criminals nor the poor” from other countries.

Among these candidates is also Verónika Mendoza, who has managed to unite the progressive and left electorate in the coalition Together for Peru, and will try to pass to the second round to discuss the political project that will allow the serious crisis of the country to ‘to be. overcome.

These elections represent an opportunity for Peru to recover the democratic institutions of the country and to manage to channel the demands of public policies that make it possible to reduce existing historical inequalities and to face the serious health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

On this Electoral Super Sunday, the second round of the March 7 elections will also be held in certain departments of Bolivia: Chuquisaca, La Paz, Pando and Tarija; In all of them, the MAS-IPSP accepted the second round. This is undoubtedly a key election for governance, considering that so far the MAS-IPSP has won in three departments and the opposition forces have won in two, and in a context where several leaders of the region, former presidents and foreign ministers denounced the interference. by OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro in the internal affairs of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, a concern reinforced by the recent memory of the coup in November 2019.

Four days before the elections scheduled in Chile on April 10 and 11, where voters, councilors, mayors and governors would be elected, Parliament passed a law to postpone them until May 15 and 16, due to the epidemic of infections and deaths. that the country has experienced in recent weeks due to the coronavirus.

Despite Chile’s decision, this Super Sunday we will have elections in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, three countries whose democratic institutions have been violated in recent years.

* Director of the Electoral Observatory of the Permanent Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean (COPPPAL), Executive Director of Institutional Policy of the Office of the Mediator of the City of Buenos Aires and Professor at the Institute of Political Training of the Ministry from the inside (INCAP).