Guillermo Lasso and the superiority complex | Opi …

If a football team wins on penalties in a final, it will be the champion. However, he will never be able to boast of having won by a landslide. Any (self) deception that leads them to believe that they are far superior to their rival could be the first step to the next defeat. Extreme results cause such blindness that many times we are unable to measure our victory. Or our defeat.

Mauricio Macri needed a second round to win in Argentina in 2015. In the first round he only got 26.7% support from the entire roster. It was his real strength. What is obtained in the waiver is real, but subject to “a conditioned scenario”. Confusing the first with the second – believing yourself to be stronger than yourself – leads to serious errors. Neither the overconfidence nor the underestimation of the opponent when they tied you – or even won in the first place – are good advisers. Neither in football nor in politics.

In the case of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso must choose the way forward, el to govern with a superiority complex seeing himself as an all-powerful president after his victory in the second round, or if, on the contrary, he modestly assumes that he has won, but that he will have to govern taking into account the fact that in the first round he only obtained 13.96% of the result, equivalent to 19.74% on valid vote, and that in the Assembly, there are barely 12 members out of 137.

Taking one route or another will be decisive for its future and its institutional stability. Four years is too long to want to govern alone or from a position of strength that he does not have. There is no doubt that having the executive power will give you great strength to run the country your way, but not enough if you want to launch a “one hundred percent lasso” program. He has no choice but to seek deals that go beyond fleeting pacts based on a distribution of power quotas in favor of a certain political leadership (as happened with the election of posts. in the Assembly, with Pachakutik).

Lasso will have a very multifaceted opposition. Politically, he will face the correísmo, with a bench of 49 members of the assembly and with a vote in the first round higher than yours and second not so far (barely four hundred thousand votes difference). If this force is dedicated to making a frontal opposition, without concessions, by ear in the street and listening to the problems of the people, it will be an increasingly important political subject and with which Lasso will have to argue in a democratic key. .

But political opposition will also come from other sides: a) the indigenous movement, who goes beyond a significant percentage of his submissive leadership; b) the former Christian Social Party, with whom he already had the first fight in the new legislative course (although they will probably come to understand each other since they share roughly the same ideological corpus); vs) a citizen sector not affiliated to any party, this represented at the electoral level nearly 30 voting points in the first round.

To this complex picture must be added the economic situation, also seen from different angles. On the one hand, in the short term, the impatience of the populations to resolve a delicate economic situation which affects wages, employment, family debt, etc. On the other hand, the pressure from the International Monetary Fund and what they call “the market” for decisions to be taken precisely against the citizens. And finally, the difficulty that Lasso will have in reconciling his preferential treatment to the most closely linked sector, the financial sector, as well as to its economic allies, above other groups of companies. We must not forget that economic power is never monolithic. And Lenín Moreno knew how to please everyone because he did not belong to any camp. Lasso’s case is different.

Nothing is written. We’ll see if Lasso assumes he’s a “ weak president ” and acts on it or, instead, chooses to disguise himself as Superman and end up being Macri, Duque, Kuczynski, or even Piñera himself. These are a bad times to be a neoliberal extremist.

Alfredo Serrano Mancilla is doctor of economics, director Celag