Ecuador takes a turn with the takeover of Guillermo Lasso, amid multiple crises and the challenge of sealing the rift with Correísmo

QUITO.- The former banker and conservative right-wing politician Guillermo Lasso will take the reins of Ecuador on Monday, a country affected by a “triple crisis” and in which he will seek to seal the rift with a correísmo defeated in the last elections..

Lasso, 65, who replaces the unpopular Lenín Moreno, inherits “A very strong national situation due to a triple economic, social and health crisis” aggravated by the pandemiche said to AFP political scientist Karen Garzón Sherdeck from SEK International University. In this sense, analysts believe that the new government will have to work on three axes: vaccinating the population against Covid-19, prioritizing public spending and improving productivity.

“The new president must face the three crises in parallel to be able to reactivate the economy and that there can again be a generation of jobs and well-being in the population,” he told the AFP the economist Alberto Acosta Burneo, of the consultant Grupo Spurrier.

The Moreno government, which came to power promoted by former socialist leader Rafael Correa (2007-2017) and later became its opponent, admitted that Ecuador was facing in 2020 the worst economic crisis in its history in due to the recession and the effects of the pandemic. , which leaves more than 417,000 people infected and 20,000 dead.

Last year, the dollarized Ecuadorian economy, dependent on its oil exports, shrank 7.8% and for 2021 a 3% improvement is expected. But this projection is not enough, according to Acosta. “The objective of the new president must be to change this scenario, he cannot be satisfied with a growth of 3% because it is necessary to take into account the fact that it is a rebound after a very strong fall” , did he declare.

Discomfort

To alleviate the economic difficulties, Moreno resorted to high debt with the millionaire issuance of bonds and obtaining credits from multilateral organizations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Total liabilities soared to 63% of GDP in December ($ 61.3 billion). Lasso must “prioritize public spending, spend on what is important to no longer depend on debt because it is increasingly difficult to get into debt,” Acosta said.

The president-elect, whose main campaign proposal was to vaccinate nine million people against Covid-19 in 100 days, admitted he was facing “very complex realities, unlimited needs, with very, very limited resources” . And he warned that he would resort to “very creative tax reforms”.

Along the way, he will have to overcome “a general feeling of pessimism caused by the pandemic, by the loss of jobs, the loss of income,” said Acosta. Between December 2019 and last March, unemployment in Ecuador fell from 4.6% to 5.5% while monetary poverty fell from 25% in December 2019 to 32% in the same month of 2020.

Page change

Lasso, who obtained 52.36% of the vote, 4.72 points more than economist Andrés Arauz, 36, and Delfín de Correa, won power for the conservative right in Ecuador in the April 11 tie-off. This ended a series of triumphs for socialism. “It is obvious that the defeat of Andrés Arauz closes precisely an important chapter of Correismo,” said Garzón Sherdeck. However, he warned that “what this government does or does not do, or how this government does, will also have repercussions on a possible return of the correísmo”, whose leader lives in Belgium and is sentenced in Ecuador to eight years of prison for corruption.

After receiving the president’s credentials and referring to Correa and his reform to allow indefinite re-election, Lasso said “many disillusioned Ecuadorians came to believe that those in power would never cede power.” However, Moreno promoted a referendum that eliminated this amendment, closing the way for Correa to return to rule Ecuador.

The elected president has his eyes fixed on Washington, but also on Moscow. In the economic portfolio, Lasso opted for the engineer and economist Simón Cueva. “The current minister [Cueva] He visited multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And at those meetings, he did pretty well, ”Lasso told the Ecuadorian newspaper. Trade.

A few days before his appointment, Cueva activated – since April 11 – a series of meetings with ambassadors from Russia, China, the United States, the European Union and the President of Chile, in order to obtain doses against Covid-19.

On the other hand, we also know that the new Minister of Defense will be Fernando Donoso, who confirms that there will be a “total and radical” replacement in the military leadership.. The minister did not give the new names of those who will occupy the leadership positions of the three military forces and the leadership of the Joint Command, but said the line of command succession will continue, according to the newspaper. Trade.

The conservative Lasso, who will lead the country for four years, calls his government “of the meeting” to try to get out of the divisions between correísmo and anticorreísmo, which weighed on the polarized electoral campaign.

With the forces dispersed and without an absolute majority in the unicameral Congress, his Creando Oportunidades (CREO) party had to ally with sectors of the center and the left to reach a front that took control. Although this union prematurely ended the alliance between Lasso and the traditional Christian Social Party (PSC, right-wing), with which he became president. In this scenario, there remains “a fragmented National Assembly and a new government with great challenges to govern,” Garzón Sherdeck said.

AFP and Telam agencies

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