The role of Durán Barba behind the unexpected return of the conservative candidate to Ecuador

CARACAS.- Hello, Tik Tok. President of the Lasso ”. As if it were an Ecuadorian phoenix, Guillermo Lasso, 65, seems another, rejuvenated and even daring in his messages. As if it were an Americanized version of North American Joe Biden, a man of consensus to pull the country out of a historic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The conservative candidate passed very little in the second round (a meager 32,115 votes separated him from the native Yaku Pérez), very far from the correista Andrés Arauz, who surpassed him by more than 1.2 million votes.

He looked like a defeated candidateSo much so that even a part of his supporters at one point preferred that Pérez confront the one chosen by Correa to bring the citizen revolution back to the Andean country despite the corruption scandals that haunt him.

Until the political miracle is operated, by the hand of a multidisciplinary team, with political experts, specialists in social networks, public relations and multimedia. They drastically transformed the image, the rhetoric and the proposal until they led Lasso to challenge vote by vote in a very close final, according to the polls.

A task that seemed impossible after a first round in which Lasso, who in 2017 was close to victory over Lenín Moreno, stagnated in the middle of the campaign, overwhelmed with being politically classified in the ideological right, without opening up to different social groups with physical problems and limited by their religious ideas, close to Opus Dei.

In the Lasso team, Jaime Durán Barba stands out, vital at the time in the electoral victory of Mauricio Macri. The well-known advisor pieced together the context and form of the former banker’s candidacy until it led him to fight for victory at the polls next Sunday 11. He is believed to be behind the main slogan and a historical meme, which fiercely struck his rival: # AndrésNoMientosOtraVez.

“The strategy is based on the slogan ‘Encontremonos’, with a clear concept that we are all against Correa. He opened up the ideological spectrum, he met minority groups, he moderated his speech, ”summarizes political analyst Matías Abad.

Belt weight

Another success of this second round, despite the efforts of the former president himself, is that Arauz could not detach himself from the figure of Correa. People do not vote for a “second”, as has been said so many times in the past month. A dichotomy that Abad sums up: “Arauz, without Correa, did not reach the second round. But with Correa by his side, it is not enough to win ”.

Aware of the importance of Durán Barba, Correa has not spared criticism against him: “This is how they prepared the rescue of the bank in 1998. Durán Barba, current political adviser to Lasso, was the secretary of the administration of (the former president) Jamil Mahuad”.

In such a scenario, Lasso moved with the agility he does not have thanks to the genius of Crudo Ecuador, a collective of 2.0 gurus who has already led Xavier Hervás, champion of the democratic left, to around 16% in the first round. In his time, Crudo Ecuador delighted the people with his memes criticizing the citizen revolution, which provoked a campaign of harassment of power.

Dressed in shoes and a red jacket, with a crutch on his right arm and to the beat of the Wrong Michael Jackson’s new look for the 65-year-old former banker has reached 335,000 likes and 4.4 million views on Tik Tok, the short-video social network, youth favorite and milestone in waivers.

In this way, Lasso succeeded in reaching young people in a country where their vote is final: 60% of voters are between 16 and 29 years old. About 15% are still undecided while the electoral silence has already been decreed.

In all networks, Lasso far surpasses Arauz, even if he compensates with the digital army of his boss and his political allies on the continent. 48% of Arauz’s campaign traffic comes from fake accounts, compared to 27% from Lasso, according to a study of local experts.

“This April 11, put on your red shoes and let’s write history together!” Lasso’s campaign ended with a video on Tik Tok to the beat, of course, of Michael Jackson.