Correísta Luisa González and young businessman Daniel Noboa -son of a magnate who was a five-time candidate and surprise of the night- will compete for the Presidency of Ecuador in the second round on October 15. In the midst of the state of emergency decreed by the Government after the assassination of the candidate Fernando Villavicencio -his party came in third place-, the day passed without major incidents.
With almost 78% of the votes counted, González held 33.19% of the votes and Noboa 24.04%, followed with 16.37% by the assassinated Fernando Villavicencio, who was replaced by Christian Zurita.
Although the polls already predicted that González would be the most voted in the first round, thanks to the hard vote that Rafael Correa's political current usually receives, Noboa was not in the pools and his support had a meteoric rise in recent days. , driven by the youth vote and by presenting an "outsider" image.
González, a lawyer and former assembly member who held various positions within the Correa administration, highlighted in a public intervention in front of her followers that she will be the first woman to contest the second round of a presidential election in Ecuador. "We call for the unity of all Ecuadorians," said González, who followed the results accompanied in Quito by the former vice president of the Government of Spain and former secretary general of Podemos Pablo Iglesias.
For the candidate of the Citizen Revolution, the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a staunch enemy of Correa due to the allegations of alleged corruption that he made against him throughout his journalistic career, harmed his candidacy and prevented him from achieving a victory in the first place. lap.
To have won in the first round, he needed to have gathered 50% of the votes or, on the contrary, at least 40% and no less than ten percentage points ahead of the rest.
Noboa, 35 years old and son of tycoon Álvaro Noboa, who was a five-time presidential candidate, became the surprise of the night by placing second and going to the ballot where once again a Noboa will face correísmo, as he already did his father in 2007 against Correa. The candidate of the ADN political alliance began to gain momentum after his participation last Sunday in the presidential debate, to the point that he overtook other more well-known and media faces in the presidential race such as former vice president Otto Sonnenholzner, environmentalist politician Yaku Pérez and former legionnaire and security specialist businessman Jan Topic.
"It will not be the first time that a new project turns the political 'establishment' around. That freshness in doing politics is what has brought us here," he assured at the press conference, held in Guayaquil and to which his staff from The campaign did not allow access to the media or international agencies.
Although in an interview carried out in July with EFE she defined herself as center-left, Noboa comes from the business circle of Guayaquil, one of the great economic engines of Ecuador, while Luisa González has her roots in the rural area of the coastal province of Manabí. , an origin of which she is always proud.
Whoever wins these elections will succeed the current president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, to complete his 2021-2025 term, interrupted by the head of state last May by invoking the constitutional mechanism of "cross death", with which he dissolved the National Assembly (Parliament) and forced this extraordinary electoral process.
In third place in the ballot, far from being able to get Noboa out of the ballot, is the murdered candidate Fernando Villavicencio, riddled with bullets by alleged Colombian hitmen on August 9 as he left a political rally in Quito.
Villavicencio's votes will fall on Zurita, to whom the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures this Sunday after denouncing that he has received death threats similar to those received by his colleague days before his murder.
Meanwhile, in the elections to the National Assembly (Parliament), correísmo aims to have a large representation that can be around 40%, according to the scrutiny of the national assembly members, followed by the Construye movement, that of Zurita and Villavicencio, which has 21% when 34.75% of the votes had been counted.
