Ecuador: Understanding Noboa’s victory

First published in NLR Sidecar.

On 13 April, Ecuador held presidential runoff elections amid widespread violence, militarization and political polarization. As usual, the contest was a two-horse race between the Citizen Revolution (RC) — the left-wing movement founded by Rafael Correa, who governed from 2007 to 2017 – and the right-wing establishment, led by the incumbent Daniel Noboa. Although polls favoured the correista candidate, Luisa González, the final tally saw Noboa triumph by a wide margin, 55.5% to 44.6%. González refused to recognize the result and denounced what she claimed was possible fraud, noting that the executive had effectively brought the country’s electoral bodies under its control. Other regional leaders — including Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico — expressed similar concerns. But calls for a recount have so far come to nothing.

At once the serving president, the official candidate of the right, the owner of an enormous family fortune and the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, Noboa was able to exploit his various positions of power during the campaign. His victory gives him a free hand to extend the tripartite programme he has been developing since he took office in 2023: neoliberal austerity, extractive accumulation and an ‘internal war’ against drug trafficking. Meanwhile, the left is in retreat, unable to challenge the result and unsure of its next steps.

To understand the election and its fallout, we must first look at the dynamics of the vote. Each candidate won 44% in the first round. In the runup to the second, every public opinion poll, including two exit polls on 13 April, showed either a tie or slight advantage for González. Her chances were boosted by alliances she had made with other political forces — most notably the electoral vehicle of the indigenous movement, Pachakutik. Yet when the results were announced, Noboa appeared to have won almost all the new votes that were up for grabs, with 1,343,000 to González’s 172,000: an increase of 110%. It is possible that the RC shed a significant number of its ‘soft’ supporters after the first round, while failing to pick up new ones. But there are no precedents in Ecuador, nor in Latin America as a whole, for this pattern of vote distribution between the two rounds. One study compared the results of 32 runoffs across the region and found that Ecuador was 2.7 standard deviations above the mean.

The RC claims that there were irregularities with 13,900 voting records, while the OAS has reported technical problems with the ballots. Although election observers have not found evidence of systematic fraud, they have highlighted the profoundly unequal conditions in which the ballot took place. Last November, the electoral tribunal ruled to disqualify Jan Topic, a right-wing contender running on a ‘law and order’ programme who threatened to split Noboa’s vote. The same month, the authorities intervened to suspend Vice President Verónica Abad from office so that she would not be able to assume the role of acting president while Noboa was on the campaign trail — which meant that, in a break with standard protocol, he did not have to request a leave of absence in order to fight the election. The tribunal flatly ignored allegations that the president and his party were abusing public office, while at the same time opening proceedings against a number of opposition leaders, including the popular RC mayor of Quito Pabel Muñoz. It also bowed to pressure from the executive by cancelling the vote of residents in Venezuela and implementing a number of ad hoc reforms such as banning the use of cell phones while voting.

There were several other factors that helped tilt the balance in Noboa’s favour. The government unlocked almost $550 million worth of ‘aid’ for specific sections of the electorate, who were told that the cash transfers would only continue if Noboa was re-elected. It was able to weaponize virtually the entire media: using public broadcasters to promote its narrative, cosying up to private outlets and spending exorbitant sums on digital campaigning, with no regulations to rein it in. The Armed Forces also intervened directly in the campaign, supporting Noboa’s decision not to take a leave of absence and publishing partisan communiqués to dissuade voters from backing the RC. The government’s declaration of a ‘state of exception’ the day before the ballot hammered home the fact that Ecuadorian democracy is now under military tutelage.

The 2025 race was, in short, the most opaque and unequal since the return to democracy in 1979. There have been calls to make the details of the count fully transparent, but the electoral bodies, and Noboa himself, remain implacable. The implications for Ecuador are dire, considering the current government’s direction of travel. In January 2024, Noboa launched what he described as an ‘armed conflict’ to deal with rising crime and stamp out the drug trade. Since then, society has become increasingly militarized, with cases of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings multiplying by the day. Last December, four Afro-Ecuadorian adolescents in Guayaquil were disappeared by a military patrol and later executed, sending shockwaves across the country.

This repressive turn can be read as a reflection of the establishment’s flatlining neoliberal agenda. In 2019, Correa’s wayward successor Lenín Moreno signed an agreement with the IMF, pushing through a series of punishing market-led reforms and moving the country sharply to the right. Over the following years, state capacity was steadily weakened: assets sold off, public-sector workers fired, services starved of funding. Upon taking office, Noboa made a series of new commitments to the Fund, agreeing to accelerate the reform programme in return for $4 billion of financial assistance. By the end of 2024, the country was suffering from a 2% contraction in economic activity; substantial increases in poverty, which affected 28% of the population, and extreme poverty, which rose to 12.7%; an unprecedented environmental breakdown, with an average of five oil spills per week; plus severe migration and security issues.    

Noboa’s ministerial team, drawn from his personal circles and the wealthiest stratum of domestic elites, lacks basic experience in public administration and has struggled to respond to these convulsions. Under its tenure, Ecuador has suffered the worst rolling power outages in national history, lasting for up to fourteen hours a day between October and December 2024, thanks to poor planning and inadequate investment. Partly as a result, Noboa’s approval ratings have been in decline, at one point falling below 40%. The so-called ‘war on narco-terrorism’ represents the government’s attempt to securitize its way out of this crisis. Noboa insists that criminals are to blame for Ecuador’s social problems and that ‘human rights’ have been preventing the state from dealing with them properly. The military can now operate with impunity in ‘red zones’ where gangs are thought to be active, and, following a constitutional referendum last year, it has been given expanded powers to collaborate with police. In his 2025 presidential campaign, Noboa attempted to consolidate this new right-wing common sense, announcing contracts with foreign mercenary groups, while touting new US military bases and a potential security cooperation deal with Trump.

All this goes hand-in-hand with Noboa’s increasingly authoritarian disposition. Shortly before the second round, the Constitutional Court criticized the president’s security policies and his arbitrary use of states of exception. It ordered the creation of an ‘Interinstitutional Commission’, mandated to confront violence without overriding the constitutional order. Noboa simply ignored the ruling. He has made clear that his government will not be bound by legal norms, as we saw from its dramatic raid on the Mexican embassy last year. His aim is to style himself as Ecuador’s Nayib Bukele: a strongman willing to use blunt force against poor and racialized communities in order to protect ‘ordinary’ citizens. His proximity to the Armed Forces is a clear sign of how the state’s primary role has shifted in recent years – away from guaranteeing the basic conditions of life, towards visiting death and destruction on its internal opponents.  

We already know what to expect from Noboa’s second term: more militarization at the expense of social programmes; more financialization, with the removal of controls on money laundering; privatizations, labour flexibilization and international investment treaties. Yet his plan to convene a Constituent Assembly marks an apparent shift from previous oligarchic governments. While the details remain unclear, it looks like the purpose of this body will be to give Noboa’s policies enough legitimacy so that they can be framed as a coherent national project – not just a series of piecemeal reforms to upwardly redistribute wealth, but a comprehensive programme to reverse correismo and roll back the gains of the 2008 Constitution: social rights, environmental protections, plurinationality, the role of the state in driving development, constraints on privatization and foreign military bases.

What does this mean for the Ecuadorian left? Since the end of Correa’s presidency in 2017, the RC has been considerably weakened by three overlapping processes. The first is the perceived betrayal of Correa’s legacy by Moreno, who was elected to continue the correista project yet quickly made a pact with right-wing elites and capitulated to the IMF — sowing deep resentment and damaging the party’s credibility. The second is the political-judicial harassment of the RC’s senior cadre in the name of ‘anti-corruption’: a campaign that began with Moreno and intensified under later governments, with the Attorney General, the Comptroller, the judiciary, the executive and the media all waging a ‘judicial war’ which has seen dozens of left-wing leaders imprisoned or forced into exile, casting due process to the wind. The third is a wider attempt to undermine any expression of collective identity — equating this with ‘communism’ or ‘chavismo’, in the hope of staving off a repeat of the popular mobilizations that propelled Correa to power.

Together, these processes have succeeded in shifting Ecuador’s ideological centre, especially among the middle and popular sectors. They have forged an ‘anti-populism’ which anathematizes both the RC and the most radical sectors of the indigenous movement: not by invoking the traditional discourses of left and right, but by opposing the inclusion of the lower strata — stigmatized as plebs or criminals — in mainstream politics. In light of this, the RC has decided to redirect its energies. Rather than mounting a forceful opposition to neoliberalism, it has simply focused on surviving as a political movement. It has tried to use its successive parliamentary majorities — from 2007 to 2025 it was the country’s largest parliamentary bloc — to exert influence on the judiciary and other institutions involved in the anti-correismo campaign. The rationale is that ending this onslaught is a necessary precondition for someday regaining power.

It is clear that this strategy has failed on its own terms, since it has been unable to effect any change in the character of these elite institutions or slow the pace of their attacks. It has also prevented the RC from participating in the popular resistance against neoliberal policies, putting it at an even greater distance from its social base. Amid the current crisis, the party has shirked its responsibility to act as a conduit for mass frustration and channel it in a productive political direction. This, in turn, has helped the right to advance — not only pushing through its regressive fiscal programme, but also diffusing its ideas on the cultural front: taking aim at feminists, ecologists, anti-racists, indigenous peoples and so on.

If there is any hope for the RC to regroup, it lies in the changing set of alliances which we saw in the recent election. In the first round, the president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Leonidas Iza, ran as the candidate for Pachakutik, winning 5% of the vote and placing third. That gave him significant influence in the electoral arena, which is not his natural political habitat, since he comes from the indigenous base and gained prominence through the street-level revolts against the IMF in 2019 and 2022. Iza’s movement and the RC have long had an antagonistic relationship, with the former accusing Correa of shutting them out of the political system in his second and third terms while implementing economic policies that harmed the indigenous community. The principal dividing line is the issue of extractivism, stridently opposed by CONAIE and Pachakutik but viewed as a necessary driver of development by the RC. Such tensions have proven fatal in previous electoral battles. In 2021, Pachakutik refused to support the RC in the presidential runoffs and called for abstention, which effectively handed victory to the right. In 2023, the indigenous movement was divided and did not endorse any candidate.

This time, however, Iza took a hard line against Noboa, denouncing his administration as ‘neo-fascist’ and negotiating a unity pact with González. In a series of assemblies, the indigenous movment and the RC put together a joint programme, bringing in other left parties and civil society groups (anti-mining, afro-descendants, feminists, trade unions). The final deal foregrounded the state’s role in redistributing wealth and guaranteeing social rights: the major themes of Correa’s original platform. It was opposed by some indigenous groups who accused Iza of reaching a unilateral agreement with the RC – yet it has become increasingly obvious that the aim of these organizations is not to assemble a broad progressive front, but rather to cultivate ties with Noboa in the hope of winning concessions from the establishment. Ultimately, the attempt to close the gap between correismo and wider popular forces failed to break the right’s grip on power. Yet it is a clear sign that, as the oligarchy tries to fortify itself against democratic pressures, it may face a more determined and united opposition in the years ahead.