Elections in Ecuador: Conservative Daniel Noboa resoundingly defeats socialist candidate Luisa Gonzalez

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa won re-election this Sunday after contestably defeating in the second round the Socialist candidate, Luisa Gonzalez, who fell by a distance of more than ten points, but even so, did not recognize his defeat, leaving the door open for a legal or social conflict beyond the elections.

"This victory has been historic," the Ecuadorian president said after the results were official. "A victory of more than 10 points, of more than one million votes, where there is no doubt who the winner is."

Although the latest polls and exit polls showed an even election between the conservative president and his leftist challenger, Noboa won by a considerable difference, reaching 55.93% of the votes against Gonzalez's 44.07% with more than 90% of the counters counted.

In numerical terms, the difference between Noboa (5,399,562) and Gonzalez (4,254,716) was more than one million votes.

However, despite the huge gap revealed by the official numbers of the National Electoral Council (CNE), candidate Gonzalez did not acknowledge her defeat and, instead, denounced a "grotesque fraud," telling her supporters that she will ask for a recount of the votes.

"I refuse to believe that there are people who prefer lies. Violence before peace. We are going to ask for a recount and for the ballot boxes to be opened," Gonzalez affirmed. "He used the authorities of the CNE and TCE to do whatever he wanted, to trample democracy and then the state of exception to guarantee the grotesque fraud we are witnessing."

While Gonzalez was speaking in front of her followers, thousands of Ecuadorians were already celebrating Noboa's triumph in the country's main cities, including Quito and Guayaquil.

Almost at the same time, Diana Atamaint, president of the CNE, recognized Daniel Noboa as the winner of the elections by marking an irreversible trend.

The CNE, which is reporting the results live, had earlier revealed that voter turnout in this runoff was 83.38%, a little higher than in the first round, when Daniel Noboa obtained 44.17% of the vote, slightly above Gonzalez's own 44%.

Noboa defeats Gonzalez and electoral doubt 

Daniel Noboa, a 37-year-old businessman who took over Ecuador's presidency in 2023 for an extraordinary 18-month term, won re-election in an election marked by the fight against organized crime and growing citizen discontent over the energy and economic crisis.

The young president reached power for the first time bursting as an outsider, assuming the responsibility of completing the mandate of Guillermo Lasso, who dissolved the Parliament amid a political scandal. Already in that campaign, Noboa promised a strict policy against crime, especially after the murder of former candidate Fernando Villavicencio, which shook the country and the region at the time.

Former President Lasso, regarding the results, euphorically congratulated Noboa.

"Today is also a day to feel proud as Ecuadorians: once again, we fulfilled our democracy by exercising our right to vote (...) With the official results of the CNE, already public knowledge, the trend is clear: Daniel Noboa has received the majority support of the electorate," he wrote. "I congratulate him for this victory. For the second time, the Ecuadorian people have given him their trust, which must be translated into a government faithful to the law and committed to the interests of the majorities. To be president is the highest honor the people can grant us (...) I wish you the greatest success in your administration. May God and the Constitution guide your decisions for the good of Ecuador."

Now, the main challenge for Noboa will be to show concrete results in the fight against drug trafficking and insecurity in a context where the latter continues to be one of the greatest concerns for Ecuadorians.

Despite the internal discontent and the deterioration of his image, Noboa once again dealt a blow to Luisa Gonzalez, whom he had already defeated in 2023.

The key to Noboa's triumph was in his capacity to agglutinate his political base, the undecided electorate and the "anti-correista" vote, a sector he had already partially conquered in the previous elections.

Luisa Gonzalez, candidate of Revolución Ciudadana - the party founded by former socialist president Rafael Correa - tried to position herself this time as an "independent" alternative to Noboa, even adopting a conservative and anti-immigration discourse in order to attract votes outside of "Correísmo," the main leftist current in the country.

However, his strategy proved not only ineffective but also counterproductive: the correísta base was weakened, and González failed to convince either the undecided electorate or the conservative voter.

In addition, the candidate was harshly questioned a month before the elections, after declaring in the March presidential debate that she would recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela, refusing to qualify the regime as a dictatorship.

Noboa capitalized on those statements to reinforce the association between Gonzalez and Correa, despite the former president's attempts to distance himself from his own candidate's campaign.

Although Gonzalez sought to capture the conservative vote by refocusing his discourse in social terms, the differences between the two candidates were marked in his substantive policies. Noboa, for example, campaigned promising less state intervention in the economy with key alliances in the private sector. Meanwhile, Gonzalez promised a more present state, increased public spending, state credits and institutional reforms that were highly questioned by a broad sector of Ecuadorian society.