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Daniel Noboa has won Ecuador’s presidential election as the South American country battles an unprecedented crime wave and an ailing economy.
Noboa, a centre-right former lawmaker, beat leftist rival Luisa González in a run-off election on Sunday, taking 52 per cent of the vote with 93 per cent counted.
“Tomorrow, your new president of the republic will get to work,” Noboa, who will take office in December to become the country’s youngest-ever leader, told supporters on Sunday night in a victory speech from his mansion on the Pacific coast. “We’ll start working to rebuild a country that has been gravely hit by violence, corruption and hatred.”
Noboa campaigned on a market-friendly platform of youth employment and promoting foreign investment. The 35-year-old served a short stint as a lawmaker, from 2021 until May this year, and chaired the economic development commission in the country’s National Assembly. Before that, he held management roles at Noboa Corp, the family business.
His father is Álvaro Noboa, one of Ecuador’s richest men and once a serial candidate for president himself. The family company was a leading producer of bananas, among other exports.
The snap election was triggered when President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the National Assembly in May using a “mutual death” constitutional clause. The self-made banking millionaire faced impeachment proceedings in the opposition-controlled assembly. He did not stand for re-election.
Noboa will complete the final 15 months of Lasso’s term, leaving little time to advance policy goals. He will face opposition in a hostile assembly and economic headwinds including a widening fiscal deficit, lower energy revenues and higher interest on debt repayments.
González had campaigned on a platform of social spending similar to that of her mentor Rafael Correa, whose tenure as president from 2007-17 coincided with a commodities boom, heavy public spending and a reduction in poverty, while his government took about $18bn of loans from Chinese banks.
Her loss represents a huge blow for Correa, who wields influence in Ecuador despite living in exile in Belgium to avoid the consequences of a corruption conviction relating to his presidency.
Markets rallied in response to Noboa’s victory, with Ecuador’s 2035 bonds jumping 2.87 cents on the dollar on Monday. Quito defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2008 during Correa’s government, and in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.
Security was voters’ main concern in an election campaign marred by violence. Anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated in August ahead of the first round of voting.
Fuelled by drug-related crime, the country’s homicide rate has quadrupled between 2018 and last year, when 4,800 people were murdered. In the first six months of this year, 3,500 homicides were reported in the country of 18mn people.
Noboa promised a tough approach to organised crime, including jailing criminals on prison ships.
“We just want to feel safe again,” said retiree Katia Bustamente after voting for Noboa at a school in the capital Quito. “We need some stability.”
Andrea Torres, an academic, said as she voted that the country needed to “restructure the police to weed out corruption and restore institutions”.
Ecuador’s economy, which is reliant on exports of oil and seafood, is forecast to grow 1.5 per cent this year and 0.8 per cent in 2024.
Noboa has promised to promote foreign investment and jobs for young people with tax benefits to employers.
“One of the main drivers of this election was a general frustration with the status quo,” said Sebastián Hurtado, who runs Prófitas, a Quito-based political risk consultancy. “Noboa — a fresh, young face — managed to get that vote.”
Noboa will also face a hostile National Assembly, where his National Democratic Action party holds only 13 seats out of 137. Correa’s Revolution Ciudadana party is the largest bloc, with 48 seats.
“Correismo is too strong to fade away, but not strong enough to win the executive,” said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “They can obstruct via the National Assembly but not govern — a recipe for paralysis and instability.”
Additional reporting by Carla Valdiviezo in Quito
