Ecuador: How militarization and fear politics secured the right’s victory
First published in Spanish at Nueva Sociedad. Translation by Adam Novak for Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
Daniel Noboa, 37-year-old son of banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, won the second round of elections on 13 April with 55.6% of votes against Luisa González’s 44%. It was a peculiar election in which the Correísta candidate [supporter of former president Rafael Correa] barely gained any additional votes in the second round, which fuelled suspicions about the election. While González alleged fraud, figures from her own political group accepted the electoral result.
Noboa came to power in November 2023 for a year and a half to complete Guillermo Lasso’s term, who had to leave office early. Lasso activated the so-called “crossed death” mechanism to dissolve Parliament and call elections — both legislative and presidential — to avoid an impending impeachment process. Noboa, amid uncontrolled growth of organised crime, encroached upon the rule of law and resorted to a “firm hand” approach and militarisation, in a situation marked by an energy crisis and governmental inefficiency.
Nueva Sociedad asked three prominent analysts for their opinions on the elections and what the results portend for the political future and the fate of democracy. Franklin Ramírez Gallegos is a sociologist and professor-researcher at the Department of Political Studies at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO)-Ecuador; Augusto Barrera Guarderas holds a doctorate in Political Science, Administration and International Relations from the Complutense University of Madrid. He was mayor of the Metropolitan District of Quito between 2009 and 2014 and currently serves as a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE). Pablo Ospina Peralta is a lecturer at Simón Bolívar Andean University, researcher at the Ecuadorian Institute of Studies and activist with the Experience, Faith and Politics Commission.
How do you explain the surprising margin in favour of Daniel Noboa in the second round?
Augusto Barrera Guarderas: The overall electoral process, beyond the voting exercise and vote counting, was marked by a series of irregularities. The electoral observers’ report itself highlights the lack of clarity in the president-candidate roles that blurred “the boundaries between the roles and created an imbalance in the competitive conditions”. To reach this legal ambiguity, Daniel Noboa confronted his own vice president, Verónica Abad, preventing her from occupying the presidency during the electoral campaign, as established by the Constitution. At the same time, he openly used public resources through a last-minute bonanza of subsidies that will cost the treasury nearly 600 million dollars and, in the final days, had state officials wear his party colours in an enormous territorial mobilisation effort. Given this and more, the process occurred on an uneven playing field made possible by the permissiveness and complicity of the media and institutional apparatus.
Having acknowledged this, it is unlikely that electoral fraud with manipulation of votes, tallies and ballot boxes was executed. While this has been Luisa González and Rafael Correa’s position so far, many local authorities from Revolución Ciudadana, such as Quito Mayor Pabel Muñoz and Pichincha Prefect Paola Pabón, have already distanced themselves from this accusation, which will have little traction. To date (16 April), there is no formal challenge to the National Electoral Council (CNE).
This means that this surprising result of an 11-point difference (55.6% to 44.4%) does indeed reflect the population’s decision. To understand the electoral evolution, from the virtual technical tie at 44% in the first round, Noboa gained 1,283,433 votes, almost everything that was in dispute, while González only added about 158,000, almost ten times less. This difference of nearly one million votes comes from an increase in Quito and Guayaquil (half a million votes), followed by growth in the central-southern highlands (Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, Tungurahua and Azuay).
None of the polling companies or exit polls showed a difference of this magnitude, but a detailed analysis reveals that while Luisa González’s vote reached its ceiling in the first round, capitalising on the terrible government management, Noboa’s political, media and institutional operation was more efficient in capturing almost everything still up for grabs.
Franklin Ramírez Gallegos: The final picture of the 2025 runoff was unexpected and implausible. It is still necessary to study in depth, with a focus on each territory, what reconfigurations of preferences and vote transfers occurred in the last weeks and days. This is particularly important because all public opinion research agencies — and even the two exit polls on election Sunday — gave a distance of 1 or 2 points in favour of one candidate or the other (with even greater options for Luisa González throughout the campaign and even hours before the election). None anticipated the final margin favouring Daniel Noboa.
The elections began, in late 2024, with the disqualification of Jan Topić, a right-wing pre-candidate whose agenda monotonously focused on security. Topić was one of the most threatening rivals to Noboa’s candidacy, and his presence on the ballot would probably have changed the story we know today. The entire electoral institutional framework is co-opted by the executive power. The Electoral Disputes Tribunal, which resolved this disqualification (as also happened with Pachakutik’s list of assembly members), also intervened to suspend the political rights of Vice President Verónica Abad (who should have substituted Noboa if he had requested a campaign leave of absence) and ignored complaints against the president and leaders of his movement for using public resources in the campaign and for campaigning whilst being public officials. It has also enabled proceedings against opposition politicians. The most emblematic case, still ongoing, is the initiative to try to revoke the mayor of Quito, Pabel Muñoz, from Revolución Ciudadana, accused of campaigning in 2023 whilst performing his duties. Just as Noboa does now. The president has placed himself above all electoral regulations and various constitutional principles (for example, he should have requested leave and did not do so) throughout the campaign.
The electoral institutions did not place any limits on him. Rather, they restricted rights — use of mobile phones for electoral monitoring on election day — and supported arbitrary last-minute decisions (state of exception, prohibition of entry to foreigners, change of polling station locations, unusual presence of the armed forces in the process, cancellation of the vote for Ecuadorians residing in Venezuela, among others). The implementation of seven social subsidies (for 560 million dollars) in the last two months, as a clientelist lever, has not even been observed by the electoral authorities.
In short, the 2025 elections were the most unequal and opaque since the return to democracy and disproportionately favoured the president-candidate. Doubts about the results must be understood in light of the fraudulent nature of the entire process. It is clear that Luisa González — whom Revolución Ciudadana itself has been leaving alone in the denunciation of fraud — requires a more consistent “theory of fraud” for her demand for a vote recount to carry weight, but it is also clear that the competition did not take place with minimal conditions of fairness and transparency. Rigged elections do not give democratic legitimacy to those who win. They only affirm abusive power.
Pablo Ospina Peralta: It is very unusual that in a second round, with 1,200,000 votes in play, 1,100,000 would opt for one candidate and only 100,000 for the other. It’s odd. But, at the same time, there is no material evidence of fraud. González’s party deployed more than 40,000 observers to polling stations across the country, and only a few questionable tallies have been presented. Under these conditions, fraud of such magnitude is only conceivable through manipulation of the computer system when aggregating the tallies and adding up their results. Revolución Ciudadana has a councillor on the National Electoral Council, who has not made any complaint or statement in support of the fraud allegations. It seems difficult to accept the fraud thesis solely because the results are surprising, without any direct evidence.
What do Daniel Noboa and Luisa González’s campaigns tell us about the political-ideological confrontation in the country?
Augusto Barrera Guarderas: Electoral campaigns have undergone a radical transformation. Far from being spaces for debate about national projects, they have adopted commercial marketing logic. This trend manifests in the personalisation of leadership, the “emotionalisation” of discourse, the digital segmentation of messages, and the disappearance of programmatic platforms. Ecuador’s last electoral campaign does not escape this global trend.
After the impact of the first security measures (declaration of “internal armed conflict”) that raised government approval, in the months immediately preceding the election, Noboa’s popularity was declining. The lack of results in security, the handling of the energy crisis — with recurrent power cuts — poor governmental performance and some arbitrary actions foresaw the possibility of a victory for Luisa González.
But this perception was transformed during the runoff campaign. On one hand, the omnipresence of security in public debate almost immediately led to legitimising proposals for a heavy hand and penal populism, while invisibilising any other programmatic aspect or even a different approach to insecurity. At the same time, several weak points in Luisa González’s campaign were amplified: the spectre of abandoning dollarisation (which Ecuador adopted 25 years ago), the proposal of “peace managers” in neighbourhoods — which the government compared to Chavista collectives — or the contradictory position of recognising Nicolás Maduro while threatening to expel Venezuelan immigrants, to which was added doubt about Rafael Correa’s guardianship over her presidency. The social debate was shifting from the deficiencies of Noboa’s government to a new version of the Correísmo-anti-Correísmo divide.
While Noboa increasingly clearly expressed an organic agreement of all power sectors to prevent the arrival of Correísmo, the main initiative of Revolución Ciudadana was to sign an agreement for the unity of the left. Although this is undoubtedly an important step that hopefully will have continuity, the unity was processed with and by the leaderships in dubiously participatory situations and with the opposition of several of its members. It is very difficult to think that the distrust and resentment accumulated and amplified over years will disappear without sincere and clear pedagogy from the main leaders, who were conspicuously absent at decisive moments, and without a truly shared horizon. Without these attributes that require time and will, unity did not have a positive electoral effect. Rather than adhesions, it produced reactions fuelled by fear of chaos and violence, enhanced by a long campaign of stigmatisation against indigenous and social leaders that has penetrated the imagination of urban sectors, including middle and popular classes.
It should also be noted that there was a significant difference in the territorial depth of the campaigns. While Noboa mobilised the entire state apparatus in an activism never seen in his administration and achieved alliances with local authorities, leaders and strongmen, Revolución Ciudadana could not build a territorial expansion strategy. The results show the scarce increase in voting across practically the entire country.
The highly conservative and “securitised” context in which society operates imposes limits on the ability to formulate and think of solutions. The presidential debate and social climate was one of attacks, disqualifications, extreme polarisation, and fake news. And thus, with fear installed, the dichotomy of good versus evil, order versus chaos, freedom versus oppression was constructed.
Franklin Ramírez Gallegos: More than the campaigns themselves — which generally moved along the coordinates of the “anti” (anti-Noboism / anti-Correísmo) — the way in which political blocs and alliances were configured relatively clearly delineated the terrain of ideological combat. In particular, the way Leonidas Iza and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) approached the construction of a collective position of support for Luisa González as a unitary dynamic of the left against Noboa’s “neofascist right” was key — which, nevertheless, did not eliminate mutual distrust. In doing so, Iza highlighted the difference between the indigenous movement and Correísmo, but radically distanced his supporters from any support for Noboa. “Not a single vote for the right”, “the null vote is not viable”. The resolution, constructed in successive Plurinational Assemblies of the movement, brought forces such as the Socialist Party and social organisations (peasants, anti-mining, environmentalists, communal, Afro-descendants, feminists, neighbourhood, trade unions, etc.) closer to the thesis of support for Luisa González.
Such convergence establishes a turning point in the trenches that have bifurcated Correísmo from the rest of the left. González’s direct involvement in the “unity” seems to have been decisive in its more or less well-achieved final staging—criticism of Iza from various indigenous organisations was not scarce for his support of the Correísta candidate.
Iza’s allusion to the “neofascist moment” of the right is linked to the “internal war” that Noboa declared in January 2024 amid the growing wave of national violence. Since then, cases of forced disappearance, false positives, extrajudicial executions, forced displacements, etc., have multiplied, not only as an effect of gang violence but of the militarisation of public security itself. The issue of human rights is again placed at the centre of the dispute. The case of the murders of the “four [Afro-descendant adolescents] of Las Malvinas”, after being detained by a military patrol, had a long impact on the popular field. Thus, it is not just about confronting the “neoliberal oligarchic right” of always. The overflow of state violence requires — that was the interpretation — the broadest political unity. Noboa did not make the slightest gesture of disturbance at the complaints against his “internal war”. In the campaign, he exacerbated the war agenda by announcing contracts with foreign mercenaries, American military bases, and agreements with Trump in this regard. The support of the armed forces for the president throughout the campaign draws the axis of the power bloc in the years to come. The “war on narco-terrorism” is the great discursive innovation of the Ecuadorian right amid the inertia of its neoliberal and anti-leftist (or anti-Correísta) ideological platform. The majorities have made this framework their own and see no other way to address security problems than by redoubling cruelty and violence against “evil”. Human rights, in this logic, are part of the enemy to be overcome.
In the advance of this frontier of power and war ideology, it can be seen that the results of 13 April concern not only a specific defeat of Revolución Ciudadana but are a blow to the whole of the left and the popular plurinational field that, in an unprecedented way, converged in these elections. At the forefront of denouncing the militarisation of the country have been Afro-Ecuadorian collectives, neighbourhood organisations, communal, human rights, and families and women of victims and prisoners. This organisational fabric also experiences the outcome of the runoff as a defeat. One arm of the government campaign explicitly proselytised by mocking human rights.
Pablo Ospina Peralta: In practice, both candidacies came very close in their specific programmatic proposals. Both promised a Constituent Assembly to ensure control of the rest of the state institutions and to reform the uncomfortable innovations of the Montecristi Constitution (2008). They competed to convince that their hand would be firmer and their trigger easier against crime. Noboa summoned a foreign mercenary, Erik Prince, to solve his credibility problems; González got the last-minute support of Jan Topić, a presidential candidate in 2023, whose letter of introduction was having been a mercenary in several wars. González promised greater social sensitivity and better professional competence in compensation and social containment policies, instead of de-institutionalised assistance deliveries of subsidies, medical aid and tariff reductions. González committed to reducing the Value Added Tax, raised by Noboa, from 15% to 12%. Both promised to continue promoting large-scale metal mining, which has generated so much opposition in communities harmed by extractivism. In international politics, one promised to recognise Nicolás Maduro’s regime, while the other to approach and beg for the leftovers of Donald Trump’s policy. The differences were magnified by each side as if Stalinism were facing Mussolinism.
Are we facing an authoritarian regime?
Augusto Barrera Guarderas: A trend towards a deteriorated form of democracy with authoritarian profiles is observed. There are several factors that push to exceed the tenuous line of the rule of law (states of exception, partisan use of justice institutions, including electoral ones, etc.).
These decisions are justified by the need to confront violence and insecurity; this social climate grants a carte blanche to push increasingly towards an authoritarian state. But at the same time, there is a certain media-institutional complicity to confront Correísmo and by extension any form of popular response or alternative. In this circle of terror, republican institutions are weakening.
We must not forget that Noboa’s re-election expresses the concentration of economic and political power with family overtones that announces a form of oligarchic regime. The campaign and the government’s own spokespersons have very few substantive contents that allow identifying the vision of the country proposed by the re-elected president. We will have to follow closely whether this authoritarian perspective will deepen or some form of management with institutional overtones will open up.
Franklin Ramírez Gallegos: Shortly before the second round, Noboa’s government made public its refusal to comply with a ruling from the Constitutional Court that ordered the formation of an “Interinstitutional Commission for coordination, planning and implementation of structural measures against violence and organised crime”. This is a technical mechanism to “overcome problems of violence through the ordinary constitutional regime”. The Court’s resolution, the highest instance in terms of interpretation of the Magna Carta, is of “obligatory and immediate” compliance and implies an open criticism of the government’s security policy while casting doubt on the arbitrary use of states of exception throughout the last year. But Noboa has completely ignored the Court. The country of militarisation and the permanent state of exception constitutes a propitious ground for violations of basic political freedoms and human rights and for directing a despotic relationship with society.
Just as in the contempt for the Constitutional Court, the configuration of an autocratic will that imposes itself on institutions has been constitutive of the government’s political game as its attachment to the “internal war” deepens. It has even come to order the issuance of previously vetoed and archived norms by the National Assembly.
The high courts, including the Constitutional one, have been collaborating with this democratic erosion by delaying the resolution of complex cases or pronouncing themselves ambivalently about decisions that violate rights. They have played power balances — with considerations and fears towards the president — and not the necessary respect for the constitutional order. Noboa’s wide electoral victory, still under discussion, could encourage the government’s greater authoritarian disposition. The democratic index recently published by The Economist already places 2023 and 2024 as the years of greatest deterioration of democracy in Ecuador since the measurement exists (2006).
Pablo Ospina Peralta: The entire global, regional and local environment pushes towards the demand for order at any price. Fear, uncertainty and, very especially, fear of rampant crime with figures of organised criminality unknown in Ecuadorian history, create a real danger. There is also in Ecuador a social and cultural conservatism, sensitive to religious propaganda, which takes up topics of daily life, such as abortion, adoption by homosexual couples or the corruption of traditional values, to use them politically. But Noboa has not emphasised this yet.
The centre of his authoritarianism lies in giving freedom and impunity to police and military forces against organised crime, regardless of the means or collateral victims. He even promised pardons to police for future operations. His contempt for liberal institutions and legality has not yet exceeded the limits of a country without respectable institutions respected by no one. This does not mean he cannot continue pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. Now, recognising the danger, Daniel Noboa’s government has shown enough incompetence, indolence and lack of professionalism to doubt his political ability to forge a stable hegemony of the style and duration of Uribism in Colombia or Fujimorism in Peru.
What scenario opens up based on the electoral results?
Augusto Barrera Guarderas: The president has said that it is a triumph of good over evil, but at the same time his Government Minister, José de la Gasca, has called for unity and reconciliation. Despite these uncertainties, it is clear that Ecuador’s international alignment in the new axis of the global right will deepen and a security logic based on military and police deployment will be maintained.
In the first hours after Noboa’s electoral triumph, there is euphoria from business and financial groups that have positioned two demands: to resume the adjustment of the State and, especially, to convene a Constituent Assembly.
Although there are very serious institutional imbalances, such as the institutional chaos of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS), the idea espoused by these sectors is to transfer this political electoral triumph to the arena of constitutional rules in core aspects such as rights, labour flexibility, privatisations and the development regime. This will be one of the crucial battles amid the worsening bleeding of the country, unemployment, the increase in poverty.
For Revolución Ciudadana and for a good part of the left, it is a harsh political defeat. But there are still no indications of whether this will cause substantial reorientations. In any case, it is clear that a new period opens for which it will be necessary to rethink the forms of political and social action and articulation of the popular field and its political and social organisations. There is a weakening of the social fabric and the internal war deepens distrust in institutions and people. It seems essential to make a great effort to reconnect with society that oxygenates and renews the political capacity to face the complex path that the country will have to travel. In a way, a cycle also closes that could open opportunities to reconfigure in a broad and democratic way a field for the left.
Franklin Ramírez Gallegos: We can expect a deepening of the coordinates of the “internal war” as the main axis of state action against the advance of drug trafficking and the power of criminal gangs in the territory. Violence will continue to operate as the main social regulator (with fear as a political resource) and lever for sustaining the paths of accumulation and control of resistance. The maintenance of this strategy will restrict the rest of state action both in terms of promoting national development and sustainable social protection policies. The budgetary imbalances are serious—even more so after the millionaire official campaign with treasury resources — and the dynamics of indebtedness and austerity will be reactivated. In short, internal war, financialisation — the monitoring and surveillance mechanisms of the colossal money laundering in the national banking and tax havens will continue to be relaxed — and the relaunching of the neoliberal package (privatisations, labour flexibility, investment treaties), all in conditions of greater democratic erosion (or open autocratisation), reinforcement of the civic-military axis and expansion of the precariousness and sacrifice zones of the poor and racialised.
A good part of the pending structural reforms may be resolved in a Constituent Assembly that the government plans to convene in the coming months. That was one of its campaign promises, although its roadmap and the place it may have in Noboa’s project are not very clear. The reinforcement of power obtained from his recent re-election could ensure the necessary institutional coverage to process the reforms he arranges — the only point of institutional counter-power would reside, eventually, in the National Assembly if the Revolución Ciudadana-Pachakutik agreement is maintained — without going through a process of constitutional replacement. The installation of an Assembly can be very costly for a government with no talent for deliberation and political negotiation.
It is likely, in any case, that a Constituent Assembly will end up serving as a mechanism of political endorsement that allows Noboa to gain time to configure something like a national project — a concept historically elusive for the country’s oligarchic right—which he now completely lacks. Said project, however, would continue along the lines of the state counter-reform that anti-Correísmo has pushed since 2018 under three different governments. To be brief, it would be the inverse mirror of the Constitution approved in 2008 during the beginning of the Revolución Ciudadana government. Particular bitterness would be situated towards guaranteeism, plurinationality, the active role of the State in development planning and market control, the locks on privatisations in strategic sectors and the possibility of locating military bases on national soil, social rights, the rights of nature and the participatory mechanisms contemplated therein. Both in the face of the acceleration of the war policy and a possible constituent assembly, it seems fundamental that the still incipient and fragile bet on the unity of the popular field can mature and take more robust forms going forward. The social, communal, territorial fabric requires minimal political-democratic safeguards to sustain its dynamics of resistance, care and reproduction amidst violence and state desertion. All this demands reflection, self-criticism and capacity for political innovation in the space of the left.
Pablo Ospina Peralta: The impression that the electoral result gives is that the Ecuadorian people may be aware of the government’s blunders and errors, but still consider it “new”, “young” and that “it can learn”. A year and a half was deemed too little for a definitive judgment. The electorate decided to extend the trial period for four more years. Above all, this leniency was possible because the Correísta alternative was unable either to differentiate itself sufficiently or to shake off its dead weights from the past. Anti-Correísmo is still very much alive, especially in the Sierra and the Amazon, traditional bastions of the Ecuadorian left and centre-left. The possible scenarios seem to be two. Leveraged in the search for order at any price, Noboa seeks to build a popularity similar to that of Nayib Bukele, which allows him to implement an agenda of economic liberalisation and reduction of the size of the State to its most minuscule and welfare forms. The path of Fujimori. The second scenario is the gradual and irremediable wear and tear of a useless government, which despite its stagings is failing in a war against drug trafficking that no one has ever won anywhere, and which takes advantage of what time it has left for the looting of public goods.
The nightmare will end in four years, giving way to a new uncertainty, similar to the uncertainties of the Peruvian political system, without parties worthy of the name, with a political letterhead that replaces the next one without trajectory or future. On the opposition side, Correísmo is mired in paralysis: this result has convinced friends and enemies that it cannot exceed its ceiling, neither against organic representatives of the business community, like Guillermo Lasso, nor against inept governments, like Noboa’s. The burden of Rafael Correa’s living heritage is genuinely paralysing: without him, Revolución Ciudadana is nothing; with him, it cannot win a second round. Besides any right-wing formula or new outsiders, only the structure of the indigenous movement remains, as refuge and expectation. Beyond all its limitations, it preserves a structure, prestige and moral reserve. It is an authentic social movement. It had an opportunity between 2021 and 2023. It wasted it. Perhaps it is not too naive to dream that it might have another.