Ecuadorian elections (referendum, 21 April 2024)
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Sir John Johns
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« on: January 27, 2023, 09:35:00 AM »
« edited: March 24, 2024, 08:02:29 AM by Sir John Johns »

Note: I will stop updating the Ecuadorian politics and elections thread because it take me too much time, because of health problems and hardware issues making me unable to post there on a regular basis and because Ecuador’s politics is now incredibly discouraging, frustrating and pointless at a time the country is facing the overwhelming challenges of poverty, unemployment, emigration, social destructuring, narco-criminality, explosion of violence, generalized corruption, ecological crisis and institutional decay.

Ecuadorian voters will go the polls on 5 February:

* to approve or reject in an omnibus referendum eight different constitutional changes proposed by the conservative government of President Guillermo Lasso:

- question 1: amend the constitution to enable the extradition of Ecuadorian nationals charged by foreign courts with offenses related to transnational organized criminality.

- question 2: take away the power to appoint and remove prosecutors from the Judicature Council to give it to a newly created seven-member Consejo Fiscal (Prosecutorial Council) in the Fiscalía (Attorney/Prosecutor-General’s Office) whose powers would be increased. All ongoing processes organized by the Judicature Council to select, appoint and evaluate prosecutors would be declared void.

- question 3: establish a new formula to reduce the number of National Assembly members from the current 137 to about 100 by allocating one provincial assemblyman per province with one additional provincial assemblyman for every 250,000 inhabitants, two national assemblymen for every 1 million inhabitants and 1 overseas assemblyman for every 500,000 Ecuadorian nationals residing abroad.

- question 4: establish a required minimum number of members for all political movements corresponding to 1.5% of the total registered voters in the corresponding jurisdiction and impose to all political movements a periodic audit of their list of members by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

- question 5: strip the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS) from its ability to designate and appoint through selection processes the senior officials in the independent state institutions, justice system and electoral branch and transfer this ability to the National Assembly. Introduced by the 2008 Constitution and making up the main entity of the so-called Fifth Power or Transparency Function, the CPCCS is (in theory but not in practice) an independent and apolitical body. Its seven members are elected by popular direct vote since 2019, after the approval of a constitutional amendment in a referendum the previous year.

All pending selection processes organized by the CPCCS would be declared void while incumbent senior officials whose appointment is current the responsibility of the CPCCS but haven’t been legally replaced on a permanent basis would remain in office until the organization of new selection processes under the supervision of the National Assembly and according to new regulations to be proposed by the president within 180 days and approved by the National Assembly within 365 days.

- question 6: abolish the direct popular election of the CPCCS counselors and give instead to the National Assembly the ability to designate the CPCCS counselors from a list drawn up by a technical commission.

- question 7: amend the constitution to enable the inclusion of water protection areas into the National Protected Areas System.

- question 8: amend the constitution to enable payments to indigenous people or nationalities, rural communities or individuals for the generation of environmental services.

* to elect the seven counselors (three on the men’s list; three on the women’s list; one of the list of indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio peoples and nationalities and Ecuadorians living abroad) and the seven substitute counselors making up the CPCCS whose future powers will be determined by the result to question 5 of the referendum. Voters having no knowledge whether they are electing candidates for a real and meaningful position or for a useless sinecure in an institution reduced to an empty shell: this democratic aberration is offered to you by the Ecuadorian political class.

* to elect the 23 provincial prefects (one in each province but the Galápagos) and the 23 provincial vice-prefects.

* to elect the 220 municipal mayors, each heading a canton, and the mayor of the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ).

* to elect the 864 urban counselors and 443 counselors making up the municipal councils in the cantons and the DMQ.

* to elect the 4,109 members of parish councils in the rural subdivisions in cantons and the DMQ.

* finally, the 10,666 electors in the parish of Sevilla Don Bosco, in the Amazonian province of Morona Santiago, will decide in a consulta (popular consultation) whether they are splitting from the canton of Morona and constituting the thirteenth canton in the province or not.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #1 on: January 27, 2023, 09:45:47 AM »

Electoral system and provisions

Legal electoral framework

Vote is mandatory in Ecuador for voters aged 18-65 and optional for voters aged 16-17, voters over the age of 65, members of military and police forces, expats, persons with disability and illiterates. Abstaining from voting without providing a justifiable reason is punishable with a $45 penalty.

Voters are voting in gender-separated polling stations with the CNE usually providing separated results for male and female voters in addition to general results.

Prisoners who haven’t been sentenced with a final judgment are also required to vote in polling stations located in the prisons while a possibility to vote at home through a mobile ballot box moved around by two delegates of the CNE is existing since 2021 for elderly and disabled voters upon request (the Voto en Casa program benefited then to 653 persons).

409,250 out of 13,450,047 registered voters are expats having the possibility to vote abroad in consulates or (a novelty) by telematic means, but only for the referendum and the election of the CPCCS members. In 2021, countries with the largest number of Ecuadorian registered voters were Spain (179,000), the United States (121,000), Italy (50,000) and Venezuela (11,000). Predictably, turnout among abroad voters tends to be abysmal with a 70.8% abstention in the 2021 first round (under adverse conditions to be honest) and a 64.8% abstention in the 2017 first round.

Foreign nationals legally residing in Ecuador since at least five years can, upon request, vote in local and national elections.

Additionally, the sale of alcohol is prohibited from the Friday preceding Election Day to the Monday immediately following it.

According to figures provided by the CNE, distribution by age groups of the electorate is the following: 16-17 (4.7%), 18-28 (25.7%), 29-64 (56.8%), 65-99 (12.7%), over 100 (0.03%). As millennials and zoomers are constituting a sizable share of the electorate, candidates for local offices are focusing into capturing the vote of younger electors by including themes that are (supposedly) interesting these voters (environment, animals’ rights, new technologies) and flooding TikTok with an avalanche of silly short videos where they can be seen singing, dancing and doing even more idiotic things.

Jorge Yunda, the former mayor of Quito running to get back his job, is here explaining his plans for animal sheltering in front of dogs and in ‘dog language’:



Far less clever (yes, that’s possible) and featuring Esteban Quirola (a former prefect of El Oro province running to get back his job) is a frightening comedy sketch and with unfunny comic actors made famous by TikTok:



Whether this will convince young voters to flock to polling stations remains however to be seen. The only tangible effect of TikTok has been so far a further degradation of the already terrible general political discourse. Or maybe this is just a perception because medias are focusing on the latest TikTok antics of the candidates rather than discussing their platforms. To be honest, however, said platforms are usually a collection of extravagant and/or arch-demagogic promises, some even improvised on the campaign trail because why not. There are some purportedly left-wing candidates for mayor of Quito who are advocating Bukele-like policies to solve criminality problems in the capital despite the fact that mayors having barely any power in the area of public safety while a candidate for mayor of Guayaquil tried to revive the 2019 asinine debate about traffic fines being way too high. A few candidates even ridiculed themselves during the TV debates when appearing seemingly totally unaware of the content of their own platforms.

There is a legislation regulating the duration and financing of the election campaign, governing the use of electoral propaganda, prohibiting cases of vote-buying (at least the most egregious ones) and forbidding the use of the resources from local and national government to be diverted for electoral purposes. This is Ecuador, so like for a lot of other stuff, what is written in laws remains only mere words on paper. Nobody is respecting the electoral legislation nor pretending to do so and the CNE hasn’t showed much willingness to get the law enforced; anyway, it hasn’t the material and financial resources to fulfill this duty. Hence why you are ending with the illegal display of election posters in favor of the incumbent mayor on the most attended highway road of Guayaquil, with candidates organizing distribution of gas cylinders or lotteries or promoting their new craft beer brand for the sole purpose of gaining votes. In the same vein, President Lasso made an address in early January to announce surprise cuts on the tax on special consumption on soft drinks, cigarettes, industrial and craft beer, plastic bags and arms and ammunition (from 300% to 30% for that latter items), a temporary reduced VAT rate during four holidays and a decrease of the currency outflow tax from 4% to 2%, all of this to, allegedly, to boost economy and enable honest citizens to defend themselves against criminals.

Election of the CPCCS

The CPCCS counselors are elected for a four-year term on three different lists: a list to fill the three seats reserved for male counselors; a list to fill the three seats reserved for female counselors; and a list to fill the seat reserved for the single counselor representing indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio peoples and nationalities and Ecuadorians abroad. Voters are expected to vote for the three lists and can vote for as much candidates as there are reserved seats for the different lists.

The requirements to be a candidate for a CPCCS seat are including:
- a track record in social organizations, citizen participation or fight against corruption or ‘a renowned prestige demonstrating a civic commitment and a defense of general interest’
- being the holder of a legally registered tertiary degree
- evidences of a ‘notorious probity’ (i.e. not having been sentenced to jail, not having been sentenced in cases of corruption, illegal enrichment, sexual violence or hate crimes)
- having a clean tax situation (i.e. not having pending obligations with the National Revenue Service or the Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security and not having ailment debts)
- not being in a situation of conflict of interest (like being a government contractor or being the espouse or relative of an elected official, a CPCCS counselor or a CPCCS delegate in charge of verifying the requirements for running for a CPCCS seat)
- not being a military or a police member on active duty
- not being the representative of a religious cult
- not having been the member of a political party/movement or having been an elected official for a political party/movement (excluding members of local councils) since at least five years.

CPCCS counselors can run for reelection only once.

Out of 191 potential candidates, only 45 were find to meet the legal requirements and will have their names appearing on the ballot: 17 on the men’s list; 20 on the women’s list; 8 on the list of the indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio peoples and nationalities and Ecuadorians abroad.

The campaign of the candidates for a CPCCS seat is being entirely funded by the CNE to ensure their complete independence from political parties, central government and private companies.

In practice, most candidates have a political background or have expressed publicly political opinions (especially on social networks); others have been the personal lawyer of a prominent politician. The main opposition party, Rafael Correa’s Citizen Revolution (RC), has went as far as publishing pictures and videos of THEIR candidates for a CPCCS seat wearing jerseys of the exact same color (cyan) than the one currently used by the RC in its electoral propaganda.



Other CPCCS candidates have already declared they should be barred to take their seats if elected for such blatant violation of election rules.

Are declared elected as counselors the three most-voted candidates on the men’s and women’s lists and the most-voted on the peoples and nationalities’ list. Are becoming substitute counselors the three next most-voted candidates on the two first lists and the next most-voted candidate on the last one. The president of the CPCCS is subsequently elected by and among the seven titular counselors.

In case a counselor is removed from office or unable to serve, he is automatically replaced by the substitute counselor who has received the most votes (providing he isn’t a justice fugitive seek for financial fraud, a case that has happened no later than two months ago). In turn, the position of substitute counselor is going to the seventh most-voted candidate (third most-voted for the peoples and nationalities’ list) and so on in case additional counselors are removed from office or unable to fulfill their duties.

Such provision has already been largely abused during the 2019-2023 term, as none the 2019 most-voted CPCCS counselors have been able to complete his term in office and all seven CPCCS seats are now temporally vacant. Four presidents have succeeded one another at the head of CPCCS since 2019 with the first one (a fairly deranged and shady Catholic priest ‘on a leave’ that publicly proclaimed God told him a constituent assembly should be summoned) is rotting in jail for having used his position to sell public offices and the second one having fallen in disgrace after the revelation he engaged into disability fraud. The National Assembly has managed to remove five counselors (four in August 2019, one in October 2020) before voting to remove four additional ones (in November 2022), in a decision challenged before courts until the Constitutional Court solved the problem on 23 January 2023 (less than two weeks before election day) by ordering the removal of all seven seating counselors over their inability to comply with a previous ruling of the country’s highest court ordering the prompt appointment of a new president of the Judicature Council. The country is now looking forward (no) for the swearing-in of the substitute counselors to complete the current term that is ending on next May.

The ruling of the Constitutional Court (published less than two weeks before election day, remember) is, according to legal experts, making ineligible the five counselors running for reelection who hence couldn’t take their seats in case of victory. Not doubt, such accumulation of absurdities surrounding the 2023 election of CPCCS counselors will help decreased the number of null/blank votes compared to the previous election when an average share of 45.0% of invalid ballots was recorded (the highest number of invalid votes in any Ecuadorian election).

Election of local authorities

Provincial prefects and vice-prefects are elected on the same ticket for a four-year term by first past the post in all twenty-four provinces but the Galápagos (which are enjoying a special administrative system since the 2009 abolition of the post of provincial prefect, an office introduced in the archipelago only in 1996). In Ecuador’s largely centralized system, the prefect has reduced attributions and has mostly powers related to rural world issues: territorial and environmental planning, rural transportation systems, management of irrigation systems, agricultural policy and promotion of local economy. In urban areas, the prefect is politically superseded by the municipal mayor while at provincial level he is facing the competition of the governor, a non-elected official acting as the local representative of the president (in every province but Pichincha, where the national capital is located) in charge of applying the government policies and managing the ruling party’s business at provincial level. Governors are members of the presidential cabinet and, as such, are suffering from the same heavy turnover than government ministers.

Municipal mayors as well as the mayor of the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ whose mayor is enjoying some additional powers) are also elected by first past the post for a four-year term. They are heading the cantons, the second-level administrative divisions of Ecuador, that are more similar to counties than municipalities, as they are combining the seat of the canton (which can be a small hamlet as well as a densely urbanized major city) with large tracts of rural lands and, sometimes (like in the case of many Amazonian cantons but also Quito or Guayaquil and its maze of islets), protected areas or ecological reserves.

Cantons are subdivided into parishes falling into two categories: ‘urban parishes’ (generally only one single parish, made up by the cantonal seat, except for towns and cities whose urban core is divided into several urban parishes; for example, fifteen in Cuenca and Guayaquil and thirty-two in Quito) and ‘rural parishes’.

Since the approval in the 2018 constitutional referendum of an amendment reintroducing term-limits, prefects and municipal mayors are unable to be elected for more than two (consecutive or not) terms.

Each canton is also electing a municipal council (metropolitan council in the case of Quito) made up by a variable number of members depending of the population of the canton, which is in charge of electing the vice-mayor, elaborating and voting the cantonal budget and ordinances and auditing the management of the mayor. Municipal counselors are falling into two categories: urban counselors (representing the urban parishes) and rural counselors (representing the rural parishes).

Each 800 or so rural parishes is also electing a parish council (junta parroquial) in charge of electing a president of the parish council and executing policies related to territorial planning, roads and transportation, economic development and environment in coordination with the provincial prefect.

Members of municipal and parish councils are elected via a closed-list proportional representation with allocation of seats being made by using the Webster method with the urban part of the most populated cantons (Cuenca, Durán, Esmeraldas, Guayaquil, Loja, Machala, Manta, Milagro, Portoviejo, Quevedo, Quito, Riobamba and Santo Domingo) being divided into several electoral districts.

Due to an electoral law passed by the National Assembly in December 2019, the open-list system (introduced in 1997 and still applying for the last local elections of March 2019) has been terminated (the most concrete effect is that vote counting operations will be faster) as well as the seat allocation according to the D’Hondt method (introduced in 2012 by the Correa administration to increase the representation of the most-voted party, then the ruling Alianza PAIS).

Mandatory televised debates between all candidates in the 38 jurisdictions with over 100,000 registered voters (17 provinces and 21 cantons) have been organized for the first time by the CNE.

Political parties and movements

Candidates in national and local elections (except election for the CPCCS) are required to be presented by an officially registered political party (a nationwide organization required to have branches in at 50% of all provinces) or movement (a political organization with a looser structure and less stringent criteria to affiliate members which party could exist at national or sole local level). Are currently officially registered 6 parties and 11 movements at national level, 67 movements at provincial level, 173 movements at cantonal level and 19 movements at parish level.

Since the 1990s, electoral alliances between parties and movements are authorized but vary greatly from one province to another one or even from one canton to another one, making the exact counting of elected offices won by each national party in the local elections impossible.

Political parties and movements are required to register with the CNE by presenting a list of members or affiliates corresponding to at least 1.5% of the relevant electoral body (about 200,000 voters for a party registering at national level) and providing a declaration of ideological principles and a government platform. A political party or movement is supposed to automatically lose its registration in case it fails to win at least 4% of the valid votes in two pluri-personal consecutive elections, or to elect at least three representatives in the National Assembly, or to elect at least 8% of the mayors, or to elect at least one counselor in 10% of the existing cantons.

In practice, the CNE hasn’t the human, material and financial means (nor the will) to check the authenticity of citizens’ signatures appearing on membership files presented by political organizations to obtain registration. It has also withdrawn the possibility for each citizen to easily known through Internet its current party membership status, a possibility firstly introduced in 2012 (leading to massive outcry over many voters being registered without their consent and knowledge) but quickly withdrawn on the pretext of protection of privacy. Similarly, several political organizations have managed to keep their registration in spite of failing to meet the minimum requirements in term of electoral results either by abusing loopholes (the electoral law was so badly written by legislators it omitted for a time to mention ‘political movements’, hence the minimum requirements initially only applied to the sole parties; before the problem had been fixed by a new electoral law, movements that should had been de-registered after the 2019 local elections had obtained the right to participate to the 2021 elections), by going before courts, by just re-registering under a new name or even by blatant government meddling. The CNE is also making no effort to ensure the basic requirements demanded to national organizations (like having an Internet website or conducting transparent and democratic internal processes) are fulfilled.

As a result, a whole cottage industry of plagiarized and forged signatures and trafficking of records of signatures has emerged, enabling the registration of political organizations with no genuine popular support nor identified political orientation and used as convenience vehicles by crony politicians to appear on the ballot, as reported in some cases, against payment to the owners of the fake political party.

Question 4 of the referendum is supposed to address such major issue that is undermining democracy by saturating electoral space with phoney political movements and scams but also preventing the registration of more legit political options as the majority of available signatures are frozen by already registered parties and movements: a good example is how MOVER (ex-Alianza PAIS) is freezing some 988,000 signatures (7.3% of the registered electorate), all collected when Correa was the leader of the movement, while it has long ceased to represent a legit or even remotely popular political option (1.5% in the latest presidential election and 2.8% in the latest legislative election) and is so weakened it is only running candidates in a limited number of cantons (32 out of 221).

Finally, it is really important to underline the fact Ecuadorian parties are weak, barely organized and disciplined, largely if not totally de-ideologized and further undermined by the lack of loyalty from both voters and candidates: 77% (95 out of 123) of the mayors elected in 2019 and running for reelection are candidates for another party than four years ago; a rate that fells however to 16.7% (2 out of 12) for incumbent prefects, even this may have to do to the relatively unimportant nature of the office.

Referendum campaign modalities

Voters can choose to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at each eight questions. Traditionally, referendum questions have all been approved or rejected in block with generally relatively few differences from one question to another one. The only exception has been during the 1994 referendum when the proposal to give legislators the ability to control state budget was roundly defeated (83.4% of ‘no’) while other proposals passed.

Political parties and movements and social organizations have to register with the CNE to campaign in favor or against the whole eight questions. Only Lasso’s party, CREO, and Avanza (a fake social-democratic tiny party) are campaigning for the ‘yes’. Meanwhile, the Citizen Revolution (RC), the National Teachers Union (UNE) and its political branch – the leftist Popular Unity (UP) (both strong opponents to Correa when the later was president) –, the General Union of Workers of Ecuador (UGTE, one of the main unions), as well as the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE, an irrelevant outfit of academics cosplaying either as radical Marxist revolutionaries either as moderate social-liberal third-wayers depending of the faction controlling the leadership and the political circumstances) are registered to campaign for the ‘no’. While not officially registered to campaign, the CONAIE main indigenous organization is de facto supporting the ‘no’.

This is the referendum campaign in which the lowest number of organizations have registered, compared to 2011 and 2018, the sign of the decline and decay of political parties and social organizations like the unions.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #2 on: January 27, 2023, 10:10:47 AM »

Stakes of the referendum

What President Lasso is trying to sell

The referendum is presented by President Lasso as a way to solve a series of urgent problems, in first place the recent explosion in violence and crime in relation with drug trafficking and the (real and partly documented but hard to assess) penetration of judicial system and other state institutions (army, police, local governments, political parties) by drug cartels and criminal organizations. I will probably elaborated on this later, because this is very important, but the homicide rate is now 25,5 per 100,000 inhabitants (a number hiding large regional disparities), credible accusations of collusion with drug cartels have been recently made against judges and politicians and the election campaign has been characterized by an unprecedented series of attacks against candidates (a candidate for mayor has been murdered few days ago, another one injured by motorcycle hitmen and yet another one saw his home target by bomb attacks twice) in a country which has until now been relatively sparred by violence (at least compared to other Latin American countries), be it politically-motivated or not.

Other problems supposed to be addressed by the referendum are including the ongoing institutional chaos derived from the intense struggle involving the government, the National Assembly, the judiciary power and the CPCCS over appointments of senior officials (the pugna de poderes ‘struggle of powers’), the incredible debility of political organizations and the alleged lack of representativeness of the parliament. The two last questions of the referendum, which are barely discussed, have been included to pay lip service to indigenous and environment-friendly voters as social conflicts over environment-related issues continue unabated.

Four additional proposals have been axed by the Constitutional Court for being unconstitutional, badly written or necessitating a prior approval vote in the parliament: one to enable the army to assist the police in the fighting against organized crime, one to automatically allocate assets seized to organized crime to education programs, one to typify extortion as an ‘organized crime’ and hence increase sentence for such offense and finally one to grant tax deduction for the employment of people over 45. The first proposal could still go before voters in the near future as there is a reasonable chance a parliamentary majority could be reached to put it to referendum.

No needs to prolong the suspense over the pertinence of such constitutional changes: none will fix any of the major issues faced by Ecuador. At best they are largely insufficient, otherwise they are useless or even counterproductive. Decreasing the number of legislators to pretend making them more representative is of course totally ludicrous and some have warned about the too high expectations created by the government in regard of extradition of criminals (possibly confused with expulsion of criminals in the minds of some voters) as the magic bullet to solve criminality, a strategy that could spectacularly backfired on the president if no significant improvement in that area happens thereafter. More generally, state institutions are deficient not much because of lack of inadequate legislation but because of lack of financial and material resources and an absence of efficient, transparent and honest management practices. The government has largely ignored that issues, doing little to address corruption and focusing on the reduction of the state budget at the expense of public investments.


Towards a take-over of the institutions by the government?

The real objective of the referendum is to relaunch the ailing presidency of Lasso who has announced he will run for reelection in 2025 in spite of low approvals (currently standing between 29.3% and 12.6% depending of the polling company). A victory will give him oxygen and strengthen his position as he is facing a hostile National Assembly and an indigenous movement energized by the success of the paro (strike combined with road blockades and street protests in the major urban centers of the highlands) of last June that cemented the indigenous organizations, and chiefly the CONAIE, as the only political force able to organize mass demonstrations and force the government to backtrack and start negotiations on the basis of a relatively coherent and comprehensive policy agenda (something Ecuadorian political parties are clearly largely unable to do these days).

With that in mind, question 5 appears as the most relevant ones as its approval would give the president a strong advantage in his showdown with the National Assembly over control of the key state positions currently appointed by the CPCCS and, potentially, could ensure him a full control over the non-elected state institutions until the end of his 2021-25 term in office.

While currently one needs a simple majority in the CPCCS (four out of seven counselors) to have an absolute control over the appointments of senior officials, in case of victory of the ‘yes’ to question 5, the responsibility to designate senior officials would be transferred to to the National Assembly where the government is betting on having more leeway to obtain what it wants thanks to vote-buying, blackmail, political horse-trading and the possibility to not rely on a very few possibilities of coalition.

More importantly, the devil is in the details, as transitional dispositions included in the annex to question 5 are not only giving the president the initiative to draft the new legal framework regulating future appointments (a framework still needing the approval of the National Assembly) but they also providing that senior officials in charge on an interim/transitory basis at the time of the proclamation of the referendum results will remain in office during the whole transition period, a period which could theoretically extend up to twenty-one months after the referendum, not including the additional time necessary to organize new selection processes under the supervision of the National Assembly and according to the new legal framework.

The government has obviously taken advantage of a change in the CPCCS majority in February 2022 (thanks to an internal ‘coup’ that installed a pro-government president) to place as much as possible of its creatures at key positions and block the appointments of people it considers as hostile, provoking in its furious struggle with the National Assembly an impossible legal mess and an institutional chaos. Especially contentious were the designations of a new superintendent of banks (the first appointee, in spite of having proposed by the government, was subsequently barred from taking his office by that same government) and a new president of the Judicature Council, the latter as I have mentioned having conducted by the removal of all seven CPCCS counselors (pro- and anti-government factions alike) by the Constitutional Court over their delaying tactics to avoid the appointment of a new office-holder.

So, to summarize, a victory of the ‘yes’ in question 5 (and, to a lesser extent, question 2) will help Lasso in his attempt to take control of most of the state apparatus and justice system, the same way the 2018 referendum enable Moreno to purge his pro-Correa rivals from the key state positions and in the same way the 2011 referendum enabled Correa to ‘get his hands’ in the judiciary system.

The rest of the questions are about popular (or allegedly so) proposals hard to publicly oppose, in first place the possibility to extradite Ecuadorian criminals, put on the referendum ballot to help pass the most important but  less ‘sexy’ proposals.


Future presidential and legislative by-elections?

Furthermore, political observers are beginning to discuss about the possibility if not the probability that, whatever the results of the referendum will be, will be triggered in future months the so-called muerte cruzada (‘crossed death’), a unique mechanism that can be decided either by the president either by the National Assembly (by a two-third vote) and will force joint legislative and presidential by-elections to complete the remaining of the 2021-2025 term. In case the muerte cruzada is triggered by the president, this one is remaining in office until the by-election and has the possibility to pass decree laws in urgent economic matters without the National Assembly having a say (only the Constitutional Court could reject said decrees in case unconstitutionality): otherwise, the president is removed (but still able to run in the presidential by-election) and replaced by the vice president on a temporary basis. The muerte cruzada can’t be triggered in the last year of the normal presidential/legislative term.

A large victory in the referendum could then emboldened the president to try getting rid of a hostile and ungovernable parliament or, conversely, a large defeat could decide the parliamentary opposition to remove Lasso on the grounds he has lost popular support (the latter case being however less plausible as it is better to deal with a severely weaken president than risking losing your seats in by-elections).

The strategy of Lasso to win the referendum has been very simple and you may already have guessed it because it isn’t particularly imaginative: focusing mostly on the (genuine) issues of criminality, gang wars and drug trafficking and accusing politicians, parties and organizations campaigning for the ‘no’ of being accomplices of criminals if not criminals themselves.

The president has been helped by the corruption scandals hurting various opposition politicians as well by the recent allegations (some serious, some totally frivolous) of the existence of ties between drug-trafficking and money-laundering networks and opposition leading politicians or candidates, in first place the RC which is embroiled in some particularly embarrassing scandals. In a series of public/media shows, the government and Fernando Villavicencio (an investigative journalist and an independent legislator close to the Lasso administration who is chairing the oversight commission in the National Assembly) have released the names of several candidates for local elections supposedly financed by drug trafficking and other criminal activities like illegal mining. A list of twenty-eight candidates (21 candidates for mayor, 2 candidates for prefect and 4 candidates for a seat in local councils) has been delivered by the interior minister to the Fiscalía but not publicly disclosed (even if several names leaked in the last weeks in the press are surely appearing on it).

Additionally, Lasso has exploited the extreme unpopularity of the political parties (in an advanced stage of decomposition) and the discredited do-nothing National Assembly (hence the demagogic argument about reducing the number of legislators ‘to save money’).


A discredited National Assembly

The approvals of the legislative power have indeed sunk into single-digit territory, the consequence of its endless bickering and odd internal agreements that make no sense from an ideological and policy-making standpoint.

To sum up things, so far the main events that happened during the ongoing legislature have been:

- the conclusion of an ‘impunity for governability’ deal between Lasso’s ‘right-wing’ CREO, Correa’s ‘socialist’ RC and the ‘right-wing’ Social Christian Party (PSC) to share the leadership positions in the National Assembly

- the last-minute collapse of said deal and a reversal in alliances that instead shared leadership positions between CREO, the ‘social-democratic’ ID and the ‘left-wing’ indigenous Pachakutik (PK) and gave the presidency of the National Assembly to this latter party

- the removal from office of the ID vice-president of the National Assembly convinced of having forced her advisers to pay back their wages to cover her own personal expenses

- a cascade of party-switching and party expulsions, to the point that at least 21 (out of 137) legislators are no longer members of the party that sponsored their candidacies in 2021

- the unexpected and ‘unexplained’ abstention of the RC in a vote on a government-sponsored tax law slammed as ‘neoliberal’ by the left-wing parties which raise suspicions over shady backroom deal between the RC and the government over the judicial problems faced by the RC leaders

- the breakup of the PK caucus between a radical wing and a more moderate, pro-government, wing

- the breakup of the ID caucus and party between two rival wings that are waging war against each other in spite of nobody being able to tell for what they are exactly standing for

- the removal of the PK president of the National Assembly and her replacement by a renegade from the pro-government caucus installed thanks to an alliance between the RC, the PSC, the radical wing of PK, one of the halves of the ID and various independents, after a never-ending process that also involved interference from the justice

- a failed attempt to impeach President Lasso that took place in the middle of accusations of hacking of the National Assembly’s electronic voting system (on behalf of the opposition) and vote-buying (on behalf of the government)

- the new parliamentary majority voting to remove four CPCCS counselors, a decision immediately canceled by a provincial judge who also ordered public apologies and the installation in the National Assembly of a plaque stating ‘no state power is above constitutional control’ (the plaque was removed after a week and the judge is now on the way of being dismissed)

As the consequence, the government has to constantly resort to horse-trading with the various parliamentary factions to get its agenda passed, with meager results. It does not help that not only the parliamentary schedule is clogged with requests for impeachment proceedings against a collection of ministers or senior officials (some no longer in charge since weeks). Yet the legislators still find time to waste on debating and voting a truckload of symbolic non-binding motions and useless ridiculous resolutions that further undermine their credibility:



The resolution instituting a ‘national day of bizcocho [some sort of local cake], dulce de leche and leaf chess’ is just the sixteenth one passed by the current parliament to create a (quickly forgotten) ‘special day’ to celebrate some random stuff. Equating already the record established by the previous legislature which actually kind of cheated with the institution of a ‘day of national cycling’  followed, one year later but for another day, of the institution of a ‘day of Ecuadorian cycling’.


The twilight of political parties

The credibility of political parties and movements is hardly any better as exemplified by the fact that all four most-voted rivals of Lasso in the 2021 presidential have since either left their parties (Yaku Pérez who left PK to start a new party he failed to register; Xavier Hervas who left the ID in the middle of its insane civil war; Pedro Freile who left AMIGO and is now running as the Ecuadorian Socialist Party candidate for mayor of Quito, eighteen months after having signed the far-right Madrid Charter warning of the dangers of ‘communism’) either are on the verge of being expelled from it (Andrés Arauz, even this isn’t yet settled).

At local level, this is even worse: 77% (95 out of 123) of the mayors elected in 2019 and running this year for reelection are candidates for a different party than four years ago, a rate that however fell to only 16.7% (2 out of 12) for incumbent prefects running for reelection (this may have to do with the fact that the office of provincial prefect is relatively less publicized and traditionally not a stepping stone towards more important positions).


Caso Encuentro, a game-changer?

So, every Ecuadorian pollsters (which have however a terrible track record due to persistent difficulties reaching young, poor and rural voters; also because most are charlatans/frauds) have predicted a victory of the ‘yes’ in the eight referendum questions but with a sizable share of undecided voters.

But, just three weeks before election day, came the ‘January surprise’: revelations by La Posta (a sh**tty infotainment website but the accusations are partly supported by – edited – audios), about the existence of a wide-reaching corruption scheme inside the sector of public companies and headed by Danilo Carrera, no less than the brother-in-law and former business partner of President Lasso. Somehow also embroiled in the scandal is Ronny Aleaga, a leading RC legislator already facing accusations of ties with narco-traffickers, a factor that is impeding the Correísta movement to fully exploit the case: how the RC will manage to conduct the recently created parliamentary inquiry on the case without mentioning the name of Aleaga who is explicitly mentioned in an audio as ‘an operator of mine’ by one of the participants of the corruption scheme?

In spite of the lousy reputation of La Posta which may using the story to avenge itself from its removal from public television (after the airing of a segment in which the two asshole presenters made racist insults about Leonidas Iza and throw darts at a photo of the CONAIE leader put on a target, great journalism as you can see), the government is currently struggling to get away from the scandal. It isn’t helped by the abrupt resignation of the secretary for anti-corruption policy, the leaking of further audios possibly implicating the foreign minister, the flight from the country of several protagonists of the case and the opening of a formal investigation by the Fiscalía which has conducted a series of searches in the case it trollishly choose to name Caso Encuentro forcing the Lasso administration, which used the Gobierno del Encuentro (‘Government of the Encounter’) as its motto to quickly change it for just ‘government of Ecuador’.

Could the scandal change the outcome of the referendum vote?
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #3 on: January 29, 2023, 02:35:14 PM »

Political parties

There are seventeenth parties and movements registered at national level of which only six or seven (namely RC, CREO, PSC, Pachakutik, ID and, arguably, PSP and UP) can be considered as ‘genuine’ by incarnating a legit political orientation (providing you aren’t too much demanding) and/or by representing a relatively important social or ethno-cultural category of the population. All others can safely been considered as opportunist organizations not too dissimilar to Brazil’s Centrão, without a solid and lasting semblance of ideology, lacing a loyal voting base and relying exclusively or almost exclusively on clientelism and influence of local bosses to gain votes.

I will describe those parties, indicate the number attributed to each by the CNE (and widely used election campaign as well as in press reports when referring to multi-party alliance), provide the results their national list obtained in the 2021 legislative election (the least bad measure to assess their strength, even if not without caveats) with regional breakdown, their official number of members and affiliates (according to this Primicias article), the number of candidates for prefects and mayors they elected in 2019 and the number of candidates they are running this year for prefects and mayors (according to a bit old, so probably not entirely accurate, Primicias article).



The four main regions: Costa (cyan), Sierra (orange), Amazon or Oriente (green), Galápagos (violet)



Map of the winning party by parish in the 2021 election of national assemblymen (legislators elected on the national list) when the results were the following:

Union for Hope (UNES) 32.2%
Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement (PK) 16.8%
Democratic Left (ID) 12.0%
Social Christian Party (PSC) 9.7%
Creating Opportunities Movement (CREO) 9.6%
Honesty Alliance 3.8%
Alianza PAIS 2.8%
All others under 2.5%

Union for Hope was the alliance between Correa’s then party (Fuerza Compromiso Social, renamed RC few months after) and the Democratic Center, a phoney party owned by Jimmy Jairala, a businessman/radio anchor and one of the most opportunist politician in Ecuador who has since broke with the RC to start his own bid for mayor of Guayaquil. The Honesty Alliance was the anti-corruption alliance between the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE) and a defunct center-right party (Concertación) that got its top candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, elected.



Creating Opportunities Movement (CREO)

Party’s list number: 21
Number of members and affiliates: 179,773

Prefects elected in 2019: 1 (incl. 1 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 34 (incl. 25 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 20 (incl. 17 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 210 (incl. 173 in alliance)

Results in 2021 election of national assemblymen: 9.6% (Costa: 8.2%; Sierra: 11.8%; Oriente: 7.3%; Galápagos: 15.2%; expats: 8.5%)

Party history

CREO (an acronym meaning both ‘I create’ and ‘I believe) is the creation and, for all purposes, the personal vehicle of Guillermo Lasso, a former executive president of Banco de Guayaquil (one of the largest banks of the country) who had briefly served as an economic ‘super-minister’ at the time of the 1999 bank crisis. While Lasso occasionally mentions he has no degree and postures as a self-made-man, he certainly benefited from the help of his brother-in-law Danilo Cabrera (now at the center of the corruption scandal in public companies), a wealthy businessman who served as a minister under dictator Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, in his business ventures and later political ambitions; on a side note, Xavier Lasso, Guillermo’s own brother, served as a UN ambassador under Correa after a career as a TV journalist and was at one point considered as a potential presidential candidate for Correa’s party in the 2021 election. All facts highlighting how Ecuadorian politics remain determined by kinship networks and how the borders between business, medias and politics are blurred.

CREO was established in 2012 to provide an alternative to the hegemonic Alianza PAIS and enable a return to power of the classical right, largely discredited by the 1999 bank crisis and excluded from government since 2002 to the benefit of anti-establishment parties. The party is advocating small-government and ‘concrete’ solutions in economic matters while defending very conservative positions in social area (a member of the Opus Dei, Lasso is a staunch opponent to abortion, even in case of rape) and penal populist measures to fight crime (campaigning in 2021 on the unfulfilled promise of loosening gun laws and now on extradition of narcos). At the same time, it has also professed some sort of compassionate conservatism and opening towards indigenous communities (Lasso’s initial vice-presidential pick in 2013 was a prominent Pachakutik leader who had became one of the first indigenous mayors in the country) as well as a commitment to the rule of law and liberal democracy and an opposition to caudillismo and excessive personalization of power.

Such postures, now for a part contradicted by Lasso’s exercise of power, enabled the CREO candidate to be elected president in 2021 (after two unsuccessful bids in 2013 and 2017) in spite of a disastrous result in the first round as Lasso pivoted before the runoff to a posture of champion of democracy, rule of law, dialogue and understanding to attract indigenous, ecologist and feminist sectors which had been progressively alienated by the policies and style of government of Correa, well helped by the little efforts furnished by the former president to recapture those sectors.

Lasso’s party has remained to some extent apart from the excess of conspiracy theories, ‘anti-communist’ hysteria and abuse of divisive and racist rhetoric that are characterizing several other South American leading right-wing parties (like the personal cults of Uribe, Fujimori and Bolsonaro) and Lasso has immediately tweeted his support to President Lula and for Brazilian democracy on 8 January 2023. There is no guarantee this will last forever, especially in face of the threat represented by potential future indigenous protests.

The Lasso administration has largely pissed off, not only indigenous (by briefly arresting Leonidas Iza on a dubious legal basis and delivering little in term of fight against poverty and malnutrition), ecologist (by continuing and extending the extractivist policies of Correa and Moreno) and feminist (by rendering de facto impossible abortion in case of rape after having promised to respect the Constitutional Court’s ruling ordering its legalization) voters but also a part of his voting core base by increasing taxes, failing to prevent the vote of an amnesty for 2019 indigenous protesters, being unable to address the criminality problem and having quickly dropped his uncompromising posture to engage negotiations with the indigenous movement.

Electoral support

The main problem, exemplified by the most-voted list map is that CREO’s voting base isn’t very large and concentrated in the large urban centers (in particular in the highlands) as demonstrated by the fact that CREO only came ahead in a handful of parishes of which only one (in the Galápagos) is a rural one.



Broadly speaking, support for CREO is relatively evenly distributed (at least compared to other large parties) with no a that large regional divide (11.8% in the Sierra against 8.2% in the Costa) but at a pretty low level (often in single digit), hence producing a map not easy to decipher.

Best results, by far, were in the affluent parts of the major cities of the highlands (38.8% in Rumipamba and 35.1% in Iñaquito in Quito; 26.1% in Atocha Ficoa, Ambato) and in the wealthy suburbs of Quito (40.7% in Cumbaya) and Guayaquil (45.4% in La Puntilla in the canton of Samborondón) comprising many gated communities, all areas also corresponding with high rate of self-identification as white (in a country where the vast majority of the population is self-identifying as mestizo).

It slightly over-performed in the Galápagos (15.2%), the urban areas as I said (the difference between Cuenca and rural Azuay in particular is striking), in the two border highland provinces of Carchi (10.0%) and Loja (10.6%) which shared both a conservative political traditional and a very low level of indigenous self-identification (bar Saraguro, Loja, where precisely CREO is irrelevant). CREO did also well in the urban core of the city of Esmeraldas (from 12.4% to 15.5%), in the small towns of the Amazon (11.7% in Zamora; 12.4% in Macas; 10.7% in Tena; 12.7% in Puyo) contrasting there with the marked lower support in the larger towns of that region (6.2% in Nueva Loja; 8.4% in Puerto Francisco de Orellana), in the inner part of El Oro where mining and domestic-market agriculture are the dominant activities and in the less rural/remote (and less indigenous) part of Bolívar province, around Guaranda-San Miguel. In Guayaquil, the party got lowest support in the urban low-income neighborhoods (7..2% in Ximena, 6.2% in Febres Cordero, 5.5% in Pascuales) compared to the wealthier downtown (15.7% in the part of Tarqui parish included in Guayas’s third electoral district). Worst results are almost systematically in the indigenous-populated areas with a few notable exceptions (in Napo and Orellana where the right-leaning PSP of former president Lucio Gutiérrez used to be very strong).

Goals in the local elections

CREO has basically gave up the local elections to focus instead on the referendum campaign. Anyway, the party has a particularly weak local infrastructure with a dismal number of incumbent mayors and (like on national level where no strong potential successor to Lasso has so far emerged) is lacking strong names to run.

Hence the biggest prizes like the prefectures of Guayas, Manabí and Azuay (respectively first, third and fifth most populated provinces) as well as the mayorship of Quito are totally out of reach. In Guayaquil, the country’s economic hub and the rival of Quito, CREO isn’t even running candidate for mayor nor lists for municipal council seats.

The right-wing party may have a shot of winning the prefecture of Pichincha (second most-populated province where is located Quito) where its candidate, Eduardo del Pozo, is a former vice-mayor of Quito, as well as the mayorship of Esmeraldas, where it is running Frickson Erazo, an Afro-Ecuadorian retired soccer player who is campaigning under police protection since two successive bomb attacks against his home and the killing of his cousin by hit-men in October-November 2022. Erazo could benefited from his celebrity status, sympathy from voters and the inability of the successive left-wing municipalities (Correísta and UP) to extend access to running water.

A victory of Paúl Carrasco, the leader of the irrelevant (Carrasco humiliated himself in the 2021 presidential by ending last out of sixteen candidates with 0.2%) Total Renovation Party (RETO), who is running with the support of an alliance including CREO can possibly win in Cuenca (third largest city, in Azuay province).
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #4 on: January 29, 2023, 03:56:27 PM »

Citizen Revolution (RC)

Party’s list number: 5
Number of members and affiliates: 204,854

Prefects elected in 2019: 2 (none in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 0

Candidates for prefects: 22 (incl. 9 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 185 (incl. 88 in alliance)

Results in 2021 election of national assemblymen: 32.2% (Costa: 42.2%; Sierra: 21.1%; Oriente: 20.3%; Galápagos: 18.0%; expats: 44.1%)

Party history

The Citizen Revolution is the latest incarnation of Rafael Correa’s personalist movement and this is the fourth election in a row that Correísmo is running under a different name and using a different color: Alianza PAIS label and electric green in 2017; Fuerza Compromiso Social (FCS) and cyan in 2019; United for Hope (UNES) and orange in 2021 and so now RC and red and cyan.

As exemplified by the choice of the party’s name deriving from a widely used label to describe the original project since the 2006 campaign (Revolución Ciudadana, whose acronym – RC – can also refer to the leader’s name, Rafael Correa – there even were plans by Correa’s brother and sister to launch in 2007 a party named Revolución Ciudadana Democrática whose initials match the ones of Correa’s full name: Rafael Correa Delgado) and the omnipresence of the former president in the RC electoral campaign (the face of Correa is absolutely everywhere in the party’s electoral propaganda and candidates are widely sharing pictures and videos of themselves appearing alongside Correa), the RC and its forerunners (Alianza PAIS and FCS) are extremely personalist movements, the term of personal cult wouldn’t be too much exaggerated. Tellingly, on the movement’s website, the first ever entry under the ‘We Are RC5’ category is ‘Rafael Correa’.

A good illustration of the heavy personalism in the RC: a campaign video of its candidate for mayor of Cuenca, widely mocked as a ventriloquist act of Correa considering how much reduced time the poor candidate has to open his mouth and how he looks like inanimate during the largest part of the video.



The political trajectory of Rafael Correa strongly contrasts with ones of other left-wing leaders in South America Latin American as he neither came from trade unionism/guerrilla/social organizations (like Lula, Morales, Mújica, Castillo, Petro, Boric or Dilma) nor from traditional electoral politics (like Tabaré Vázquez, the Kirchners or AMLO) as he has build all his subsequent political career from his position of economy minister in the government of Alfredo Palacio, an office he was appointed in April 2005 while a complete unknown with no previous political party activism. A university professor of economics by training, Correa had been previously involved in economic intellectual circles opposed to the 2000 dollarization before being appoint an economic adviser in the cabinet of Palacios, then the vice-president of Ecuador. The young economy minister (43 at the time) used his government position to establish himself as a household by strong declarations against the IMF and the World Bank even if his short time as minister (he resigned in August 2005) did enable him to achieve much. Immediately after his resignation, Correa prepared a presidential bid with some help with several private medias (notably Ecuavisa where was employed star journalist and former presidential candidate Freddy Ehlers who would later served as a minister under Correa) and, running on an anti-establishment platform, came ahead of the candidates of the discredited traditional parties to easily triumph in the runoff over Álvaro Noboa, a fat lazy polarizing demagogue owing his own political career to privilege (yeah, some disturbing parallels to be made with Macron’s own trajectory). As a result, Correa’s first party, the Alianza PAIS, was largely built on the campaign trail and expanded for a great part thanks to the influx of veteran politicians from pre-existing parties both on the left and on the right.

Correa’s style of government has been described as techno-populism, mixing hyper-presidentialism,  micro-management and unwillingness to delegate powers of the head of the state, an open disregard for parliament, political parties, medias, social organizations, a bellicose anti-oligarchic rhetoric and, in sharp contrast with traditional populism, a pretension to incarnate ‘progress’ (hence the ‘progressive’ label largely used by Correísta movement to self-identify) and to derive its political legitimacy from technical expertise, rationality and competence all validated by academic credentials. Therefore the over-representation of academics (especially economists who displaced bankers and businessmen as the main architects of economic policies), technicians and tertiary education graduates among Correa’s numerous ministers, a technocratic feature reinforced by the lecturing tone and PowerPoint presentation often used by the president during his weekly TV-show.

The excessively personalist style of government of Correa and organization of his administration (plethora and large turnover of ministries; the institution of an extra layer in the government management, the ‘coordinating ministries’; sidelining of the party, parliament and even, towards the end, the ministers themselves from the decision-making process to the benefit of the president and his close inner circle of Guayaquil’s friends and former schoolmates) resulted in the impossibility for a strong contender to succeed Correa to emerge and, ultimately, the break-up of Correa’s Alianza PAIS.

Correa being enabled to run for reelection in 2017, it was decided the presidential ticket would be constituted by Lenín Moreno (vice-president in 2007-13 who had remained a popular figure due to his personal background, his affability, his personal association with a concrete policy – inclusion of  disabled persons – and his 2013-16 stint as a UN envoy for disabled persons that kept him away from Correa’s rather bad third term in office) would be the candidate for president with Jorge Glas (an uncharismatic and unlikable figure who served as vice president in 2013-17 and spearheaded the major infrastructures program as well as a former pupil of Correa in the Guayaquil’s boy scouts). As much unbelievable it can be sound now, Moreno was supported by the left and the pro-labor wings of the Alianza PAIS while Glas, Correa’s designated but unelectable heir, received the endorsement of party’s sectors close to Guayaquil business circles.

After a difficult campaign, plagued by rumors of disagreements and disputes between the two Alianza PAIS running-mates and a series of revelations about the corruption practices of Glas, Moreno defeated Lasso in the presidential runoff by a very close margin. Once sworn in office, he lost no time getting rid of his embarrassing vice-president who got charged and sentenced in the Odebrecht corruption case (the comptroller-general, Carlos Pólit, also involved in the case had fled Ecuador even before Moreno’s inauguration). The arrest and removal of Glas precipitated the rupture between Correa (living in a self-imposed exile) and Moreno. The majority of the Alianza PAIS caucus and local elected officials sided with Moreno enabling him to take control of the party leadership, infrastructure and brand and pushed the followers of Correa outside the Alianza PAIS.

In 2018, the approval in a referendum of a constitutional amendment instituting a strict two-term limits for executive office followed by a sentencing of Correa himself to eight years in jail in a case of illegal campaign financing rendered the return of the former president in electoral politics very unlikely. After having tried for about eighteen months to govern to the left of the Correa administration in its latest months in office, Moreno rapidly shifted rightwards (more to the right than at any time of the Correa government), alienated most of his supporters, saw his approvals collapsing and basically renounced to rule the country. Meanwhile, the Alianza PAIS, left without a strong leadership, sank in electoral oblivion, suffering first a major defeat in the 2019 local elections before obliterated in the 2021 general elections.

In the meantime, Correístas found refuge in a phoney party (Fuerza Compromiso Social) whose founder, an ally of Moreno, happened to have been sent to jail for corruption, and used it as an electoral vehicle for the 2019 local elections during which the pro-Correa candidates, isolated by a ‘cordon sanitaire’, won two prefectures (Pichincha and Manabí) but failed to capture any mayorship. For the 2021 national elections, the Correa-controled FCS brokered an alliance (UNES) with the Democratic Center (CD), a movement owned by Jimmy Jairala, a businessman and radio anchorman from Guayaquil with a zigzag political career marked by blatant opportunism. The UNES presidential ticket was made up by persons representing the two main wings of Correísmo: Andrés Arauz, a young technocrat with an economics background for the academics and senior officials (dubbed as the ‘golden bureaucracy’) generally based in Quito in an attempt to repeat the Correa 2006 campaign; Carlos Rabascall, a former TV journalist and the head of public relations firm, for the Guayaquil business community members favorable to Correa. Neither had previously be a candidate in a popular election. As we know, Arauz came ahead in the first round with 32.7% (down from 39.4% for Moreno in the 2017 first round) and was defeated in the runoff for a series of reasons including the campaign for ‘ideological null vote’ promoted by the CONAIE and unions, embarrassing revelations over Arauz’s professional background and constant interference in the UNES candidate’s campaign by Correa who, from his exile, made offensive anti-abortion comments and threats of vengeance against members of civil society who participated in the 2018 referendum campaign in favor of the ‘yes’ (including chess player Carla Heredia and LGBT rights activists Pamela Troya and Silvia Buendía).

Purged from its last founding members, the FCS was renamed the Citizen Revolution in August 2021 with Marcela Aguiñaga, a former assemblywoman and environment minister under Correa, as its national president.



The RC is defining itself as a left-wing progressive political movement defending the construction of a socialism of the good living (Socialismo del Buen Vivir) model unique to Ecuador and standing for feminism, ecologism, plurality, humanism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. Ideologically speaking, its ideario is pretending drawing inspiration from the thoughts of Simón Bolívar and Eloy Alfaro (liberal and anticlerical president of Ecuador in 1895-1901 and 1906-11), scientific socialism (‘especially the Latin American one’), the knowledge and world view of indigenous nationalities, the Liberation Theology and Church’s social doctrine, feminism, decoloniality, environmentalism and ‘Latin American popular nationalism’, among others.

All ideas largely contradicted by the presidency of Correa which saw a progressive abandonment of its promises and commitments, especially during the third term in office (2013-17) of Correa when the end of commodities boom and collapse in oil prices conducted the president to introduce measures that definitively spell the end of the interventionist and nationalist economic model and set the ground for the subsequent Moreno’s right-wing turn: plans to privatize Petroecuador’s gas stations and sell state assets to finance the reconstruction in Manabí province, hardly hit by an earthquake in 2016; abolition of the state obligation to cover 40% of the Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security (IESS) expenses; acceptance of the payment of a $979 million indemnity to the US Oxy oil company whose contract had been irregularly terminated by Correa when a minister; signature of a free-trade agreement with the European Union; and finally the return of the IMF missions in Ecuador. This went hand in hand with the opening of the Yasuní park to oil extraction, the dissolution of the UNE teachers union and increased repression against indigenous organizations and communities, the passage of a gag law against medias and a social conservative turn with the promotion of abstinence-only sex education and the passage of tougher drug laws. In spite of his anti-imperialist and nationalist rhetoric, Correa never made attempts to reverse dollarization and Arauz campaigned on the promise to strengthen dollarization, which according to him would be at risk in case of a victory of Lasso.

Electoral support



The 2021 elections have confirmed the decade long process which morphed Correa’s party from one rooted in the highlands (in particular in urban areas) to one much more stronger in the coastal provinces. Compared to 2006, the map of Correa vote has dramatically changed, its worst 2006 province (Manabí) having become its stronghold, El Oro dropping from 2006 best coastal province to 2021 worst coastal province, the strong support in Azuay and the Galápagos having largely vanished, etc. It isn’t without sharing some similarities with the old PRE map.



Among the distinctive patterns of the UNES vote are a very strong support in the export-oriented plantations areas in the coast (for example between 64.4% and 48.4% in the parishes of El Guabo canton, El Oro, a major center of banana production; 42.9% in Los Rios province as a whole) but also along the coastline of Manabí and southwestern Esmeraldas which benefited from strong governmental investments (sometimes lost in corruption) after the 2016 earthquake (65.0% in Pedernales, Manabí; from 60.2% to 55.1% in the urban part of Montecristi, Manabí, a town that was also used as the seat of the 2007-08 Constituent Assembly for being the birthplace of Eloy Alfaro).

The UNES tends also to over-perform among Afro-Ecuadorians as demonstrated by its score in Esmeraldas province (40.9%), in the Chota Valley constituting the boundary between Carchi and Imbabura provinces and in Comité del Pueblo (31.0%), its best urban parish in Quito and the Pichincha parish with the higher rate of Afro-Ecuadorian self-identification (10.5%).

In majors cities it receives its best results low-income parishes and its worst in the most affluent ones, hardly a surprise (28.2% in Calderón, a popular suburb of Quito where overcrowded housing is a major problem against 13.3% in Rumipamba; in Guayaquil area, it is 48.1% in Pascuales parish and between 44.1% and 51.3% in the three parishes of Durán against 16.7% in La Aurora, a new town with gated communities and 4.9% in La Puntilla).

As a general rule, the UNES didn’t performed well with indigenous voters (10.2% in Saraguro, Loja; 11.4% in Zarayacu, Pastaza; 6.7% in Salasca, Tungurahua; 7.0% in Taisha, Morona Santiago to name a few places with a strong indigenous identity) with two exceptions: evangelicals (34.9% in Santiago de Quito or 33.9% in Flores, both located in Chimborazo; 89.2%, The UNES’s best parish, in Oyacachi, Napo) even if it’s hard to correctly assess the phenomenon in the absence of detailed and reliable data about religious affiliation; the southwest Imbabura-northwest Pichincha area (covering notably the cantons of Otavalo and Cayambe) which is possibly explained by several factors: a historical presence of the FEI (Federation of Ecuadorian Indians, the first ever indigenous organization founded notably by communist, feminist and land reform and kichwa language activists Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña) which, while nationally moribund, appears to have be co-opted by the Correa government; the support of local indigenous leaders, notably Ricardo Ulcuango, a former PK deputy and ambassador to Bolivia under Correa whose name appears on the UNES’s national list; finally, and more importantly, the socio-economic characteristics of the area where the main industries of employment are cut flowers production and textile manufacturing making a large share of the local population salaried employees of private companies and setting it apart from the majority of the indigenous population that is small farmers (the consequence is that they are less receptive to the Pachakutik/CONAIE discourse on land rights and land reform, access to water and environmental protection against extractive industries).

Also noticeable are the especially poor results in the provincial capitals of the Sierra like Ambato, Riobamba, Loja or Latacunga and interesting over-performance in mestizo-populated remote cantons on the eastern slope of the Andes like Baños (Tungurahua), Sevilla del Oro, El Pan and Chordeleg (Azuay) and Espíndola (Loja) I have no explanation for.

Goals in the local elections

While the RC caucus has registered a minimal number of defections, looking like more solid than Pachakutik and the ID, the party is entering the election period with a degraded image, the consequence of its participation into parliamentary machinations and surprise abstention in the vote of the government’s tax law and accusations of ties with drug-trafficking made notably against assemblyman Ronny Aleaga, a (supposedly) reformed member of the Latin Kings street gang, embroiled in a series of scandals over his participation to a party in a Miami villa in the company of a business and justice fugitive investigated in a case of overpricing in the procurement of medical devises to public hospitals and now suspected of having laundering drug money, the subsequent withdrawal of his visa by the US government, his awarding of military decoration to two sailors currently investigating for their ties with a drug cartel local leader and now his participation in the corruption network operating in the public companies.

Furthermore, the selection of candidates in the local elections seems to have frustrated the party’s bases as various candidates with a loyal/activist profile have been passed over in favor of people with no previous political experience, tied to business sector or seen as opportunists because they defected from other parties or because they have previously publicly criticized Correa. Such mistake, that incited disappointed RC candidates to run as dissidents or even non-Correísta candidates to posture as the real Correísta option against the ‘official’ candidate, will be blamed on Aguiñaga (even it is clear she isn’t doing nothing without the approval of the exiled big boss) in case of electoral setback and could led to a deepening of the internal feuds. Because hostilities have started even before the elections took place as the RC candidate for mayor of Guayaquil, Aquiles Álvarez, a businessman without previous political experience, has engaged in a public dispute with Andrés Arauz in late December/early January, firstly describing him as a ‘bad candidate’ and accusing him of having provoked the 2021 defeat by changing his campaign team and wrongly assumed that his first round result was his own political capital and not the one of Correa, then by calling him an ‘idiot’ in a promptly deleted tweet. In his feud, Álvarez received the support of Aguiñaga who stated that it is Arauz that started the dispute by criticizing Álvarez’s campaign and said that Arauz ‘isn’t part of the Citizen Revolution’ in spite of the former presidential candidate participating in several RC election meetings in the following days.

Anyway, the RC can hardly do worse than four years ago even if the reelections of Leonardo Orlando as prefect of Manabí (where he is facing a strong right-wing challenger, the mayor of Portoviejo Agustín Casanova) and Paola Pabón as prefect of Pichincha (embroiled in several scandals and elected in 2019 only thanks to fragmentation of anti-Correísmo into a dozen of candidacies) aren’t ensured. Marcela Aguiñaga has reasonable chances of victory in the race for prefect of Guayas, as the incumbent PSC prefect isn’t particularly popular and see her support undermined by two candidacies of PSC dissidents. If polls are to be believed, this is however game over for Aquiles Álvarez in the race for mayor of Guayaquil as the PSC incumbent mayor has a large lead and as the candidacy of Jimmy Jairala, who terminated the UNES alliance over the RC’s refusal to support his bid for mayor, is disputing Álvarez the lower-income voters and appears to have overtake him.

The surprise could come from Quito where Pabel Muñoz, an economist and former assemblyman, is reporting doing a good campaign and is closing the gap with the favorite, Jorge Yunda (supported by Pachakutik), benefiting from the inability of the right to consolidate behind a single candidacy and a high floor (but also a low ceiling). It seems probable that the less polarizing of the two will became the next mayor of Quito, bar yet another polling fiasco (back in 2019, not a single poll predicted the victory of Yunda while the favorite that year, Paco Moncayo, ultimately placed third). The polls aren’t good for the RC candidates for mayor of Cuenca and prefect of Azuay.
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« Reply #5 on: January 30, 2023, 03:27:28 PM »

Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement (MUPP or PK)

Party’s list number: 18
Number of members and affiliates: 155,881

Prefects elected in 2019: 5 (incl. 1 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 20 (incl. 5 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 21 (incl. 7 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 177 (incl. 62 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 16.8% (Costa: 7.5%; Sierra: 25.4%; Oriente: 39.9%; Galápagos: 15.4%; expats: 16.3%

Party history

Pachakutik has been founded in June 1995 as the electoral wing of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which had established itself at the beginning of the 1990s as the largest and most powerful social organization in the country through notably a series of  levantamientos (‘uprisings’) to oppose neoliberal policies and defend land redistribution, access to water for small farmers and indigenous cultures, traditions and languages.

The founders of the party were also including however numerous white/mestizo politicians and intellectuals like Alberto Acosta (ecosocialist economist, later the first ideologue of the Citizen Revolution and president of the 2007 Constituent Assembly who rapidly broke with Correa), Julio César Trujillo (1984 presidential candidate and former leader of the left-wing faction of the Christian Democrat DP) or Napoleón Saltos (sociologist and political scientist), an indication of the aspiration to open towards white/mestizo leftist sectors; Pachakutik has sponsored the presidential candidacy of several non-indigenous candidates like Freddy Ehlers in 1996, Alberto Acosta in 2013 and Paco Moncayo in 2017.

For its part, the CONAIE had been established in 1986, as the culmination of a process of organization of the indigenous movement started in the 1960s, by the grouping of the Sierra-based Ecuarunari (Ecuador Runacunapac Riccharimui: ‘Awakening of the Ecuadorian Indians’) and the Amazon-based Confeniae (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuadorian Amazon) to which was added in 1990 the Coice (Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Ecuadorian Coast), later renamed Conaice (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Coast) of a minor importance. The Ecuarunari had been itself established in 1972, initially under the aegis of the Catholic Church, and headed towards a classist orientation while the more ethnicist Confeniae had been created in 1980, sixteen years after the foundation of the pioneering Interprovincial Federation of Shuar Centers (FICSH) created to untie the various Shuar (Jivaroan) communities in Morona Santiago and whose model was replicated by other Amazon communities.

Inherited from this history are the retaining of a ‘bottom-up’ organization of the CONAIE whose three regional affiliates are themselves subdivided into sub-regional federations according to local indigenous identities, the latter between themselves subdivided into grassroots organizations representing local communities. Additionally, the CONAIE has kept a decision-making based on consultation of the bases and consensus (at least before outsider observers). Such model of organization is pretty much inevitable considering the wide diversity of the Ecuadorian indigenous population, characterized by various cleavages (Kichwa speakers/Jivaroan languages speakers/Spanish monolingual; Catholics/Evangelicals; rural/urban; cultivators/pastoralists/craftsmen, and so on). A strong Sierra/Amazon divide has at time also fractured the movement over the political orientation to decide.

Pachakutik is organized pretty much under the same schema and, like the CONAIE, is imposing a rotation of its leadership with an election being hold every three years or so. Such feature, that set the indigenous movement and party apart from the Ecuadorian traditional parties and unions (often organized around an irremovable leader) has its pros and cons.

On one hand, it enable the emergence of fresh faces, a renewal of ideas and candidates (to some extent) and prevent the confederation and the party from being the hostage of a single individual, all factors that explain the remarkable resilience of Pachakutik and its resurgence in spite of electoral ebbs and flows. It also permits an alternation of representatives of the Amazon and representatives of the Sierra (indigenous of the coastal provinces being marginalized in reason of their small number).

On the other hand, this also hampers the implementation of a political agenda and strategy on the long run and has encouraged the defection of political leaders, who, reaching the end of their term and considering the movement’s objectives no longer match their own plans, don’t hesitate to jump ship to follow their own way, generally with little success: the latest examples being the CONAIE president Jaime Vargas endorsing Arauz in the runoff against collective decision and being subsequently expelled; and Yaku Pérez resigning over the agreement in parliament with CREO.

Historically, relations between the CONAIE and the Pachakutik have experienced periods of tensions and such is again the case since the election of Leonidas Iza at the head of the CONAIE in June 2021. One of the main architects of the rebuilding of the CONAIE’s local infrastructure and a key organizer of the October 2019 protests, Iza has opposed any attempt to accommodate the government and is advocating a more radical agenda, inspired by José María Mariátegui (or allegedly so), and an overcoming of the pro-Correa/anti-Correa cleavage inside the Ecuadorian left. As a consequence, he rapidly came at odds with the Pachakutik leadership and the party’s caucus has split between a pro-Iza wing and another one, less amenable to the CONAIE leader.

The dispute isn’t helped by the presence in the caucus of questionable non-indigenous politicians (like Ricardo Vanegas, a Guayaquil shady lawyer elected on the national list), incorporated into the party as part of a strategy to improve its results in the parts of the country (coastal provinces; urban centers) it is lacking infrastructure.

Consequently, after having elected a record number of 27 legislators in 2021, the PK caucus has been reduced to 18 after the departure of three legislators to support Lasso or follow Yaku Pérez and the expulsion of six additional ones, the most loyal supporters of Iza in the house. The initial parliamentary coordinator has additionally been removed from his post in last April over the revelation he had met with Correa in Mexico few weeks before, a proof that the question of a rapprochement with the RC is remaining a hot topic inside the party, considering the controversial legacy of the former president in the area of indigenous affairs (attempt to seize the CONAIE headquarters, brutal repress and prosecution against indigenous protesters, support for mega-mining and expansion of oil frontier, undermining of the intercultural bilingual education system and closure of schools in small indigenous communities among others).

Yet, the indigenous movement can also reunited in case one of their owns is attacked: Yaku Pérez and Lourdes Tibán, in spite of their public feuds with Iza, immediately gave him public support  when he was arrested by the police while the pro-Iza wing defeated a vote to expel Guadalupe Llori (PK assemblywoman elected president of the National Assembly with the votes of CREO and belonging to the pro-Lasso faction) by either voting against either abstaining.

Finally, PK hasn’t been spared by corruption accusations: Jorge Guamán, its candidate for mayor of Latacunga, is investigated in a case of corruption happening when the prefect of Cotopaxi; Delfín Quishpe, a former Youtube singer elected mayor of Guamote, Chimborazo, has been sentenced in a case of influence peddling in the procurement of medical devices; the coordinator of the Guayas provincial branch has been expelled in August 2021 over financial irregularities. The Lasso government has also accused the party and the CONAIE to be financed by illegal mining, without however providing much evidence to support such claim.

A renewal of the Pachakutik leadership is planned in the following months with the CONAIE having demanded an ‘in-depth assessment’ of the party, its political project and announced its intention to field its list to run for the party leadership and ensure a closer relationship with the CONAIE. A move that could possibly led to a split.



Electoral support



Unsurprisingly, support Pachakutik is heavily concentrated in the Sierra and the Amazon with its strongest performance registered in the areas with a majority or plurality of the population self-identifying as indigenous: the Shuar-populated eastern part of Morona Santiago and center-eastern part of Zamora Chinchipe; the Saraguro territory covering northern Loja and the northwestern part of Zamora Chinchipe; most of rural Cañar; central Cotopaxi and northeast Bolívar; the central part of Tungurahua around Salasaca; the Chachi-populated areas in Esmeraldas inland (62.0% in Telembi, the only parish with an indigenous majority in the Costa). It do less well with Napo Kichwas and the smaller nationalities of northeastern Amazon where Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP has kept some support (38.2% in Napo province; 31.8% in Orellana province) and in Imbabura-northeastern Pichincha where the RC has a strong following.

Also interesting to notice is the strong results obtained in La Merced de Buenos Aires, Imbabura (50.2%), Pacto, Pichincha (42.8%), Tundayme, Zamora Chinchipe (59.9%), Girón (68.3%) and San Salvador de Cañaribamba (70.1%) in Azuay, all places where there is a strong opposition to mining projects or activities. Conversely, parishes where mining is representing the major economic activities gave Pachakutik very weak results: 10.3% in Camilo Ponce Enríquez (worst result in Azuay); 7.4% in Zaruma (El Oro).

The general pattern in the Sierra and the Amazon is also a significant difference in performance between rural and urban areas: most of the brightest spots drowned in an ocean of dark violet are cities and towns.

Pachakutik also manages to over-perform to some extent in places with a negligible share of the population self-identifying as indigenous (on the other hand, the last census was made in 2010, so it is possibly the indigenous self-identification has risen since), notably in most parts of Loja province, in Carchi (bar the discernible Chota Valley), eastern Pichincha, northern Chimborazo, and especially in Azuay where Yaku Pérez’s local implantation and opposition to mining projects has enabled Pachakutik to receive there 38.2%.

Also noticeable is the relatively strong 15.4% in Galápagos which is actually home to a sizable indigenous community (1990’s migrants from Tungurahua living in slums/poor neighborhoods) as well as the larger results obtained in Santa Elena peninsula/southern Manabí (areas hit hard by repeated droughts and suffering malnutrition) compared to the major part of the Costa, around the Guayas basin.

In major cities, no surprise, Pachakutik do better in the poorest parishes, notably in southern Quito (26.2% in Guamani where 10.5% of the population is indigenous) and in the historical center of the capital where indigenous settled in the mid-twentieth century when wealthiest residents relocated in the northern part of the city (17.1% in Centro Histórico; 20.6% in La Libertad) as well as in the peripheral parishes of Guayaquil (6.9% in Febres Cordero; 6.5% in Pascuales; 6.1% in Ximena) while receiving comparatively abysmal results in the wealthiest neighborhoods of the capital (6.2% in Iñaquito; 4.5% in Rumipamba) and Guayaquil (0.9% in La Puntilla; 4.8% in Tarqui-3rd Electoral District; 3.0% in La Aurora).



Goals in the local elections

Pachakutik is hoping to improve from its already rather good 2019 results (capture of the prefectures of Azuay and Tungurahua, two populous and largely urbanized provinces), driven by the success of the 2022 paro.

The biggest prize could be a victory in the race for mayor of Quito where the party is supporting the candidacy of Jorge Yunda, a media proprietor and opportunist politician, facing accusations of corruption during his first term as mayor (2019-21); he wore an electronic monitoring device during the debates. The choice of such controversial and polarizing figure is undermining Pachakutik’s last pretenses to incarnate ‘new politics’ but a victory of Yunda (who received the support of Iza), would ensure a historical victory in the capital for the indigenous party. Polls are indicating that the electoral machine of Yunda (who organized musical concerts and used his radios to promote his candidacy) is also boosting support for the PK candidate for prefect of Pichincha, Guillermo Churuchumbi, a former mayor of Cayambe who is polling second in most surveys and is hoping to overtake the RC incumbent. An election of the Yunda-Churuchumbi duo would gave headaches to President Lasso as the CONAIE could expected greater political and material support from local authorities to organize protests and blockades in and around the capital; this is, in any case, what right-wing medias are panicked about.

The candidate officially supported by the party for prefect of Azuay, Dora Ordóñez is lagging in the polls, partly the consequences of an internal dispute over her selection. In Cotopaxi, Pachakutik has nominated Lourdes Tibán, a former assemblywoman, as its candidate for prefect; she will face four other indigenous candidates including former prefect César Umajinga (previously elected for Pachakutik but running now for SUMA) and Arturo Ugsha, the UP candidate rumored to be supported by Iza.

In Orellana province, Pachakutik is supporting, in alliance with CREO, the candidacy for prefect of Daniel Lozada, a veteran opportunist politician previously arrested in a corruption case, who will be opposed to incumbent prefect Magali Orellana (UP), once a member of Pachakutik.
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« Reply #6 on: January 31, 2023, 03:55:50 PM »

Social Christian Party (PSC)

Party’s list number: 6
Number of members and affiliates: 161,669

Prefects elected in 2019: 8 (incl. 5 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 43 (incl. 34 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 13 (incl. 7 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 140 (incl. 103 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 9.7% (Costa: 14.4%; Sierra: 4.8%; Oriente: 3.0%; Galápagos: 21.3%; expats: 8.5%)

Party history

The PSC is the successor of the Social Christian Movement (MSC), established in 1951 by a modernist and reform split of the Conservative Party claiming to be inspired by the Church’s social doctrine (the PSC is still using as a symbol a red arrow with two bars, largely similar to the symbol of Chile’s National Falange and Christian Democratic Party). The leaders of the new party, Camilo Ponce Enríquez and Sixto Durán-Ballén, were young politicians from Quito with a technocratic background. The MSC rapidly became a personalist vehicle for Ponce (elected president in 1956, an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1968) who, as president, is mostly remembered for the 1959 bloody crackdown on student protests that led officially to the deaths of 16.

After the death of Ponce in 1976, the party leadership passed to Durán-Ballén who unsuccessfully ran for president in 1978-79 with the support of the ruling dictatorship, before being superseded by León Febres-Cordero (LFC), the member of an oligarchic family from Guayaquil who got elected president in 1984. Cultivating the image of a macho strongman and supporting a platform inspired by Reagan and Thatcher, LFC had a rocky and ultimately unsuccessful presidency, marked by a succession of strikes, a disastrous earthquake, numerous clashes with a turbulent Congress and a series of military mutinies, including one during which he was forced on the Taura military base by rebel soldiers to sign at gunpoint the pardon of their leader. The LFC administration additionally had probably the worst human rights record of any Ecuadorian government since at least the 1920s, with brutal crackdown on trade union protests, a disproportionate response to the emergence of a tiny urban guerrilla and the formation of death squadrons responsible of acts of torture and forced disappearance (Restrepo case: the disappearance at the hands of the police of two Colombian teenagers in Quito).

With the rise of LFC to the head of the PSC, the right-wing party experienced a dramatic change of its electoral voting base which shifted from Quito and the Sierra to Guayaquil and the Costa, a shift deepened by the failure of Durán-Ballén candidacy in 1988 and his 1991 departure from the PSC and by the election of LFC as mayor of Guayaquil in 1992.

After the two humiliating defeats of Jaime Nebot, the LFC’s pick-handed successor, in the 1992 (against Durán-Ballén, now leader of a short-lived party) and in 1996, the PSC largely renounced to recapture the presidency (running second-tier candidates) to instead entrench its domination over Guayaquil (it is controlling the municipality since thirty-one years now, a situation without equivalent in the rest of Ecuador) and consolidate its status of largest party in parliament, using all along the 1990s and early 2000s this position to extort benefits from the successive governments, build unholy alliance in the Congress (the infamous 1994 pacto de la regalada ganada concluded with the populist party of Abdalá Bucaram whom LFC had previously persecuted when president) and being the driving force of various political machinations that led to the removal from offices of three presidents.

When Nebot, who had already succeeded to LFC as mayor of Guayaquil in 2000, inherited the leadership of the PSC in 2008, at the time of the death of LFC, the party, which had also been affected by the large discredit of the traditional parties, had been displaced as the main right-leaning force by Álvaro Noboa’s PRIAN and, later, Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP. Nebot attempted to relaunch the PSC by focusing of the defense of the interests of Guayaquil and the coastal provinces and exploiting the traditional resent of the Pearl of the Pacific against Quito and the central government (following a discourse which can pretty much be summed up as ‘Quito is stealing the money of hard-working Guayaquileños to distribute it to the lazy indigenous and finance an overbloated bureaucracy’) and promoting a greater autonomy for the Costa (a bit like the Bolivian right-wingers in Santa Cruz, but less racist and less extremist) notably through the creation of a new Guayas provincial party, Madera de Guerrero, supposed to reinforce the regionalist image of Nebot but which ended as functioning like the provincial branch of the PSC.

Such strategy quickly found its limits as Correa dedicated a lot of resources to implant his party in the Costa, to the point Alianza PAIS rapidly established itself as the most-voted party in the coastal provinces and in Guayaquil, at least in national elections because none of the candidates ran by Correa’s party managed to represent a threat to Nebot’s position as mayor of Guayaquil, indicating the existence of large cohorts of electors voting for Correa in the national elections and for Nebot in the local ones. Nebot was indeed reelected in 2009 and 2014 in a landslide (respectively, 68.4% and 59.5% of the votes).

In 2019, Cynthia Viteri, a presidential candidate in 2006 and 2017 (when she scored a respectable 16.3%, the best result for a PSC presidential candidate since 1996 – the party ran however no candidates in 1998, 2009 and 2013) was elected mayor of Guayaquil (with still a strong 52.6%, but continuing the trend of declining support for the PSC) while Nebot dedicated himself for a 2021 presidential bid he finally gave up, probably fearing another electoral humiliation. The PSC endorsed Lasso in the presidential election while running its own list in the legislative elections; it emerged as the largest right-wing force in parliament with 18 seats against 12 for CREO. As we see, the PSC broke with Lasso over the ditching of the agreement brokered with Correa’s party and came back doing what it is doing the best: participate into parliamentary machinations.

The position of the PSC is however very uncomfortable: while their voters can forgive them their critics against the Lasso administration in the areas of public safety (the PSC is unsurprisingly advocating a mano dura and a relaxation of the gun legislation while Viteri came from Guayaquil to a meeting of the president with elected local officials with an armada of police cars as part of a laughable media stunt), their alliance with the RC and the left-wing of PK to share positions in the National Assembly as well as its recent threat to impeach Lasso over the fight for the control of the CPCCS may be too much puzzling. The PSC is also embarrassed by the referendum as it can’t decently campaign for the ‘no’, especially in question 1, which is totally in line with their penal demagogic stances; yet, a victory of the ‘yes’ would politically reinforced the president. So, in the end, the PSC has largely ignored the referendum to focus on the locals.

Finally, a major problem faced by the PSC is the retirement of its historical leader, Jaime Nebot and the absence of clear successor to replace him. This is such an acute issue that the PSC tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Nebot to run for prefect of Guayas in the hope a large number of PSC candidates would be elected on his coattails. The cadres of the PSC can basically being divided into two categories: on one hand white wealthy men from the oligarchic families (the Falquez dynasty in El Oro, the Torres dynasty in Tungurahua, the Terán dynasty in Los Ríos); on the other hand, a collection of blonde ex-TV journalists (Cynthia Viteri, Susana González, Doménica Tabacchi, Soledad Diab, Dallyana Passailaigue or Cristina Reyes who has left the party in 2022) that would make jealous Fox News. It seems there is an ongoing fight for the control of the party between on old guard and a younger, modernizing, generation that vaguely follows the mentioned leadership’s sociological fractures lines and opposing the clique of Viteri to Nebot’s seconds-in-command.

Electoral support



A map that is broadly the opposite of the one of Pachakutik and illustrating a strong regional divide with the PSC winning over 20% of the vote in only two provinces (Galápagos, 21.3%; Guayas, 20.2%) and over 10% in only three additional provinces, all located in the Costa (Los Ríos, 10.6%; El Oro, 10.6%; Esmeraldas, 10.4%). Support for the PSC is heavily concentrated in Guayaquil and its neighboring cantons like Durán, Samborondón and Daule.

In the urban part of the ‘Pearl of the Pacific’, the PSC received between 17.5% and 37.8% depending of the parishes with its lowest results in the low-income peripheral Febres Cordero (22.9%), Ximena (22.8%) and Pascuales (17.5%). Areas where it over-performs are also including Esmeraldas province, ruled by a PSC prefect, the canton of El Carmen in northern Manabí (possibly explained by the fact the area was claimed by Pichincha – Quito’s province – in the middle of the last century, a border dispute that led to the so-called la gesta gloriosa incident that led to the deaths of 37 in 1966 and may have strengthen coastal autonomist sentiment), Los Ríos province (also ruled by a PSC prefect) and the mining area around Zaruma and Piñas.

In the highlands, the PSC got its best results in the major urban centers, in particular the wealthiest neighborhoods (11.7% in Rumipamba and 10.4% in Iñaquito in the capital), around Ambato in Tungurahua (where the Torres family has kept a large following), in Loja province and in Cañar, a province with a large indigenous population which elected a PSC prefect in 2019. It otherwise do very poorly among indigenous and, more generally, rural voters of the highlands and the Amazon.

Goals in the local elections

The PSC scored a strong victory in 2019 local elections and emerged as the largest party, even in a heavily fragmented political landscape.

It seems that Cynthia Viteri is ensured to be reelected as mayor of Guayaquil, especially as she faced divided left-wing/populist opponents while minor right-wing candidates (the most important being Pedro Pablo Duart, a former Guayas governor under Moreno) have failed to gain enough traction to take enough votes to deny her reelection. However, there may still be a little chance the PSC lost the municipality (which could be a serious, if not deadly, blow) as the campaign of Viteri, whose administration has already ridden with scandals, is going from one controversy to another one and sounds like incredibly amateurish. Imagine, you’re running on a law-and-order platform (even if devoid of any practical proposals), deadly shooting incidents are now happening on a daily basis in your city and you decide this kind of stuff will be excellent to promote your campaign:



Cynthia announcing her participation to some streaming event called ‘GuayaKill RP’, apparently a Second Life-like metaverse/video game, I don’t even understand (graphics are straight from The Sims 3 in any case). The candidate’s slogan la alcaldía de la gente is also reproduced using the Grand Theft Auto distinctive font.


Apparently, Mayra Montaño aka ‘La Bombón’, a TV celebrity and self-described journalist running for reelection as a PSC municipal counselor, will be a playable character in the upcoming GTA Guayaquil.




Things will be more complicated for Susana González, who became prefect after the death of the PSC incumbent (a former soccer player turn politician) in 2020 as Marcela Aguiñaga is constituting a solid challenger and as she is weaken by the candidacies of two PSC dissident, former prefect Nicolás Lapentti and former Guayaquil counselor Andrés Guschmer, who both are intending to play the role of a chimbador (in Ecuador’s political slang, a candidate running with the sole goal to provoke the defeat of another candidate, generally of the same political orientation).

There is no way the PSC can captured the mayor office in Quito as the party is historically weak in the capital due to its strong association with Guayaquil and there is anyway an overload of right-wing and less right-wing candidates running on a ‘law-and-order’ platform these year, leaving little room for Patricio Alarcón, who will struggle to improve from the 3.5% received by the 2019 PSC candidate.

The only reported poll is giving Johnny Terán reelected as prefect of Los Ríos while Carlos Falquez is running at 80 to regain his job of mayor of Machala he held between 2005 and 2014 and hand down to his son who failed to be reelected in 2019.
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« Reply #7 on: February 01, 2023, 04:06:25 PM »

Democratic Left (ID)

Party’s list number: 12
Number of members and affiliates: 188,605

Prefects elected in 2019: 2 (incl. 1 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 3 (incl. 3 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 17 (incl. 9 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 153 (incl. 68 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 12.0% (Costa: 8.1%; Sierra: 17.3%; Oriente: 8.5%; Galápagos: 6.4%; expats: 9.0%)

Party history

The Democratic Left has been founded in 1970 as a split from the Ecuadorian Radical Liberal Party (PLRE), the latter being one of the two old parties that dominated political life until the 1930s-1940s. The new group, which formally organized as a party in 1978, was headed by a group of young modernist members of the PLRE hailing from the highlands, especially Quito, like Luis Alberto Costales (director of the campaign of 1960 PLRE presidential candidate Galo Plaza Lasso, previously elected a president in 1948 as a dissident) and Rodrigo Borja. The new party was also rejoined by dissidents from the moderate wing of the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE).

In spite of being a member of the Socialist International and describing itself as a social-democratic party, the ID has never been a labor party and has remained above all a party representing the urban professionals of the cities and towns in the highlands. It nonetheless enjoys (or has enjoyed) strong ties with various unions, professional guilds and farmers’ organizations.

Like many other Ecuadorian parties, the ID had the unfortunate tendency to turn into the electoral vehicle of a sole person, in this case Rodrigo Borja who ran five times (1978, 1984, 1988, 1998, 2002) for president, the politician with the largest presidential bids tied with Álvaro Noboa. Elected president in 1988, Borja, in spite of the ID commanding a large plurality (32 out of 71 seats) in the Congress during the two first years of his administration, proved to be a kind of disappointment (still one of the less terrible presidents since the return of democracy), generally attributed to inexperience and neglect of the ID to have elaborated a solid political agenda. The Borja government notably passed labor laws reducing the influence of unions, largely continued (in spite of electoral promises) the neoliberal policies of its predecessors and was taken by surprise by the first major indigenous levantamiento.

The ID struggled to overcome the retirement of Borja and ran in the 2006 presidential election a candidate not a member of the party (León Roldós, the brother of iconic president Jaime Roldós, with as its running-mate Ramiro González, the ID prefect of Pichincha). Roldós then placed fourth.

The party subsequently faced a major internal crisis over the attitude to adopt in regard with the new Correa government, a crisis which ultimately led to its temporary disappearance. A faction led by González directly left to directly join the newly founded Alianza PAIS (González later found Avanza as a satellite party of Correa’s movement), another one under Gen. Paco Moncayo (the mayor of Quito) left to start a short-lived and hopeless ‘neutral’ movement organized around elected officials (Municipalist Movement) while the remaining members started fighting between supporters and opponents to Correa. The internal struggles in the ID further accelerated its electoral decline with the losses of the party’s strongholds (mayorships of Quito and Cuenca; prefectures of Pichincha and Azuay) in the 2009 local elections. As the fight between the Dalton Bacigalupo-led pro-Correa faction and the Andrés Páez-led anti-Correa clique (Páez is a former vice-prefect of Pichincha) over the party leadership intensified and even went before courts, the ID was barred to participate into the 2013 elections over its inability to elect a direction and ultimately de-registered. In the meantime, Páez had left to join CREO (he would be the running-mate of Guillermo Lasso in 2017 before shifting further right).

The ID managed to re-register in 2016 and ran Paco Moncayo (who had returned) as its presidential candidate, in alliance with Pachakutik, only to score a rather disappointing 6.7% and elect only 4 assemblymen, far from the results obtained during the party's heydays. The 2019 local elections similarly proved a major disappointment as Moncayo surprisingly failed to regain his job of mayor of Quito, placing only third. The ID then only captured a single prefecture without alliance, the one of the small and marginal Carchi province.

The designation of a candidate to run in the 2021 presidential election questioned the ability of the party to enable the emergence of a strong leader from its ranks. Indeed the two successive nominees, Inty Grønneberg and Xavier Hervas, were neither members of the ID and nor had previous electoral or party experience. After Grønneberg, a scientist and CEO of an IT company, had ultimately declined the nomination, Hervas, the head of a medium-size company specialized in export of vegetables, was nominated as the ID presidential candidate. A choice that proved beyond all expectations as the very cybergenic Hervas turned very popular with young urban voters, thanks to a low-cost campaign making a heavy use of social networks (in particular TikTok where he posted funny videos) and regular interactions of the candidate with average Internet users as well as a focus on ‘pragmatic’ solutions and environmental and feminist topics (like a relaxing of the abortion legislation).

Coming out of nowhere and capitalizing on the desesperation with more traditional candidates, Hervas placed fourth in the presidential election, with an impressive 15.9%, the best result in a presidential election for the ID since 1998. 18 legislators were elected on his coattails, again a result not seen by the ID since the Borja years.

Then things went rapidly downhill for the ID which founded once more plunged into serious disputes. The party fractured itself during the debate of legalization of abortion in case of rape, split between the social conservative old-timers and provincial caciques like Bacigalupo on one hand and the more liberal young generation led by Alejandro Jaramillo and Johanna Moreira. Meanwhile Hervas, after having made a U-turn on abortion issue, announced his departure of the ID, proving he wasn’t the fresh face of Ecuadorian politics he pretended to be. He has now largely disappeared from public scrutiny after having been publicly accused by Lasso of having lobbied the president to help him regularizing his tax situation in exchange of ID parliamentary votes.

Like previously, the ID deep divisions are going hand in hand with a legal dispute over the legitimate owner of the party’s leadership, brand and even Twitter account. Guillermo Herrera, the prefect of Carchi, has been removed in last April from the national presidency of the ID by the Jaramillo-Moreira faction during an extraordinary congress whose regularity has been challenged. The parliamentary caucus has been reduced by successive expulsions of legislators caught in corruption scandals and purges of internal opponents (for pretexts not publicly disclosed) to only 11 legislators, putting at its official recognition as a parliamentary group with all the associated privileges. The most disturbing part is that the medias seem unable to explain the real motives behind the ID internal feud.

Electoral support



The ID is also a heavily regionalized party, having in the highlands a share of votes (17.3%) almost twice the one in the coastal provinces (8.1%). However, such numbers mask wide variations at sub-regional level.

Support for the ID is concentrated in the cities in the highlands, in first place Quito where in urban area its support varies from 29.2% to 10.8% and where it get better results in the middle-class and popular neighborhoods than in the wealthiest ones (only 10.8% in Iñaquito or 13.6% in Cumbaya); a good part of the over-performance of the ID in the low-income neighborhoods in the southern part of urban Quito can be attributed to the personal appeal of Hervas in an area which previously favored Correísmo. The party is also receiving very strong results in Ambato (with a support ranging from 24.5% to 15.5%, this latter result in the affluent Atocha Ficoa) and Loja (university town where it received between 23.5% and 17.9%, this latter result in downtown El Sagrario parish where is located the city cathedral) while performing less well in the cities with larger indigenous influence (between 17.7% and 12.4% in urban Riobamba with the worst result in Yaruquies, a parish that was urbanized the latest one; between 18.8% and 14.6% in urban Latacunga) as well as in Cuenca (from 19.3% to 13.2%), a traditional stronghold where it faced the competition of Pachakutik whose results were boosted by the presence of Yaku Pérez, a native of the area and former prefect of Azuay, on the presidential ballot. These results seems to indicate that the ID got its best results among upper middle-class and middle-class neighborhoods and received a larger vote in the poorest neighborhoods than in the wealthiest ones.

The ID also got strong results in the white/mestizo rural areas: the Tumbaco and Los Chillos valleys which have partly turned into Quito’s dormitory suburbs; the valleys in the Carchi province, a historical stronghold of the ID where economy is dominated by potato production and commerce with neighboring Colombia; the northern part of Napo which distinguish itself from the rest of the province by its very low indigenous population; the canton of Baños in eastern Tungurahua, with also a very low indigenous presence and whose economy is dominated by tourism and fruit growing; finally most of the indigenous part of Loja province.

Also noticeable is the over-performance in the mining communities in southeastern El Oro (34.9% in Piñas; 28.4% in Zaruma) and in Huaquillas (between 14.9% and 22.5%), a border town where trade with Peru is playing an important economic role. The ID also receive results above its national average in the coastal cities of Manta and Santa Elena where commerce and tourism are important activities with fishing. Excluding the aforementioned northern Napo, the ID does way better in the Amazon in the mestizo-populated towns (15.0% in Macas; 14.0% in Zamora; 13.0% in Puyo; 12.9% in Puerto Francisco de Orellana but only 8.9% in Nueva Loja) than in the indigenous rural/forested areas.

This is really a key feature of the ID vote: support for the orange party tends to be the weakest with ethno-cultural minorities, indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorians and Montubios alike.

Goals in the local elections

The ID is certainly not in track to repeat the 2021 performance and may not even gaining that much (if not at all) from its 2019 bad results. The rejection by the CNE of the candidacy of Inty Grønneberg has left the party without a strong candidate in Quito: it is now stuck with Pablo Ponce, a not very well-known former metropolitan counselor and an uninspiring candidate whose latest chances of success are undermined by the fact that part of the ID is there supporting their former colleague Andrés Páez, despite the fact this one is running a very right-wing campaign. The candidate for prefect of Pichincha, Roberto Altamirano seems doomed to place, at best, fourth while the candidate for prefect of Azuay Diego Matovelle is polling in single digits. One of the hopes of victory lies in the race for mayor of Cuenca where Cristian Zamora, a former city counselor, appears well-placed to be elected, at least if the very few polls (made by the same pollster) are to be believed.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #8 on: February 02, 2023, 03:21:20 PM »

Patriotic Society Party (PSP)

Party’s list number: 3
Number of members and affiliates: 174,612

Prefects elected in 2019: 1 (incl. 1 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 9 (incl. 6 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 15 (incl. 10 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 127 (incl. 70 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 1.8% (Costa: 1.5%; Sierra: 1.7%; Oriente: 5.8%; Galápagos: 1.3%; expats: 0.7%)

The Patriotic Society Party (originally 21 January Patriotic Society Party) has been established in 2002 as the personal vehicle of Lucio Gutiérrez to support his presidential bid of that year. The son of a shopkeeper and a nurse, Gutiérrez grew up in the Amazon province of Napo, which would became its electoral stronghold, before joining the military and rising to the rank of colonel. In the mid-1990s, he served as an aide-de-camp to Presidents Abdalá Bucaram and Fabian Alarcón, playing a role in the downfall of the former in 1997. Three years later, on 21 January 2000, he led a military mutiny, in coordination with the indigenous movement, and overthrew President Mahuad, only to be himself arrested and jailed few days thereafter as the coup has been countered by the army top-level hierarchy.

Subsequently, pardoned by the Congress, Gutiérrez ran for president in 2002 on an anti-establishment and leftist platform, with the support of Pachakutik and the Marxist-Leninist MPD. Having defeated Álvaro Noboa in the runoff, he became the nearest thing to a political and social outsider to be elected at the helm of Ecuador and constituted a government comprising an unprecedented number of representatives from indigenous and campesino sectors (notably Nina Pacari, the first indigenous and female foreign minister in Ecuador, if not Latin America). Nevertheless, Gutiérrez rapidly renounced to implement left-wing policies to embrace full support to the Bush administration and shifting to the right on economic matters. Such dramatic U-turn led to the departure of Pachakutik and the MPD from the government, the conclusion of an uneasy alliance with the PSC and, after the PSC had decided to return in opposition, an attempt to build a coalition with shady populist movements that led Gutiérrez to interfere into the Supreme Court affairs and, ultimately, the downfall of Gutiérrez in April 2005 largely provoked by protests organized by the ID and the PSC in Quito and Guayaquil. In the meantime, Gutiérrez had proved an  authoritarian (proclaiming himself an ‘dictatocrat’) and corrupt president who encouraged nepotism, making him extremely unpopular among urban voters, an unpopularity worsened by his cholo (dark-skinned mestizo) status.

The PSP managed to make however an unexpected come back in the 2006 presidential election when its candidate, Gilmar Gutiérrez (Lucio’s own brother), defying all expectations, placed third and came ahead in Amazon and central highlands provinces where the legacy of Gutiérrez (said to be the first president to care and invest in rural and indigenous areas, even if for clientelistic reasons) wasn’t forgotten. Gutiérrez’s party subsequently emerged in the late 2000s as the largest opposition party to Correa, thanks to the discredit of the PSC and the collapse of Noboa’s party provoked by the ineptitude of its leader. This status of largest opposition and right-wing Ecuadorian party didn’t however lasted long as the emergence of Guillermo Lasso’s party, more palatable for white/mestizo voters, led to a rapid electoral decline of the PSP: while Lucio Gutiérrez received 28.3% in the 2009 presidential election, four years later he got only 6.7%, while in 2017 his proxy candidate received a pathetic 0.8%. Now the PSP is on life support, only surviving thanks to its (dwindling) voting rural basis, and opportunistic alliance with other minor parties.

A key feature of the PSP is the heavy masculinized nature of its electoral basis, the consequence of Lucio Gutiérrez’s military background, macho attitude (when asked about a recent high-profile case about a woman being murdered by her policeman husband, he blamed the crime on homosexuals being enabled to join the police), penal populism and advocacy of a heavy-handed methods to solve criminality (except when it comes to road safety where he turns very lenient with reckless drivers).



The PSP 2021 map is showing how much the party’s support is concentrated in the Kichwa-populated areas in northern Amazon, especially in Napo where it could still won 14.3% of the vote at provincial level. Other strongholds are including the fringes of Bolívar province and the heartland of Montubio country in Guayas, around Salitre, and corresponding to the rice-growing zone. Support for the party is barely existing in urban areas, especially in the cities’s core areas.


Popular Unity (UP)

Party’s list number: 2
Number of members and affiliates: 194,031

Prefects elected in 2019: 3 (all in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 14 (incl. 12 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 15 (incl. 7 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 136 (incl. 87 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 1.7% (Costa: 1.6%; Sierra: 1.8%; Oriente: 2.6%; Galápagos: 1.2%; expats: 1.1%)

The Popular Unity has been registered in 2015 as the successor of the Democratic Popular Movement (MPD) which has lost registration one year before, because of no longer meeting electoral requirements (the de-registration was subsequently found illegal and the MPD restored only to be merged into the UP). Like its forerunner, founded in 1978 as the electoral wing of the Maoist (or Hoxhaist depending of the source) Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador, the UP is describing itself as a Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary left-wing movement and claiming to fight in order to achieve ‘a popular, plurinational, patriotic and revolutionary government’.

In reality, the party is mostly functioning as the electoral wing of the education sector, in particular the National Union of Teachers (UNE) and the Federation of University Students (FEUE), while having adopted a flexible attitude in regard of electoral alliances, having stated its openness to alliance with center and left-wing parties. In practice, it has allied at local level with pretty much everybody (with a strong predilection for its historical partner, Pachakutik) except CREO and the PSC as well as the RC. The MPD, the UNE and the FEUE have indeed all enjoyed very bad relations with Correa (after having initially supported him) culminating with the attempt by Correa government to disband the UNE under an administrative pretext.

The MPD/UP is suffering from the lack of a well-known national leader, especially since the (unresolved) murder in 1999 of its most famous member, Jaime Hurtado, an Afro-Ecuadorian from Esmeraldas province who ran twice for president and gave the party its strongest results in a presidential election (7.3% in 1984; 5.0% in 1988).



The map of the 2021 results is the one of the party’s elected local officials: the city of Esmeraldas where the former MPD provincial prefect (2005-13, 2014-18) Lucía Sosa has been elected mayor in 2019; the province of Orellana led by an UP prefect since 2019; the province of Cotopaxi whose vice-prefect was an UP member elected as the running-mate of the Pachakutik elected prefect; finally the cantons of Salitre in Guayas and Santa Isabel and Chordeleg in Azuay. Also noticeable is the southern part of Manabí, around Jipijapa which is maybe explainable by the decline of the historical coffee production and repeated droughts that hit the area.

All of this tends to suggest there isn’t much hope of survival for the UP in the long-term.


Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE)

Party’s list number: 17
Number of members and affiliates: 171,564

Prefects elected in 2019: 1 (in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 14 (incl. 13 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 14 (incl. 8 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 117 (incl. 86 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen*: 3.4% (Costa: 2.0%; Sierra: 5.9%; Oriente: 3.8%; Galápagos: 6.8%; expats: 2.1%)

*as part of the Honesty Alliance with Concertación

The PSE is currently the oldest active political party in Ecuador after the disappearance of the Conservative Party and Radical Liberal Party in the 2000s. It has been established in 1926, four years after the founding event of Ecuadori labor movement, the Guayaquil general strike which was repressed in a bloodshed by the then-oligarchic government. The party quickly divided itself into a socialist/social-democratic wing and a communist one which joined the Third International but managed to have some influence on the progressive-leaning military dictatorships that intermittently ruled the country in the 1930s.

Nevertheless, a number of political and economic factors hampered the development and consolidation of a strong labor movement and political party: absence of a real industry, low number of state employees, weight of informal sector in the economy and, above all, restrictions on voting rights against illiterates (or persons considered as such) which prevented the advent of mass democracy until the 1970s/80s (in 1984, the year of the first election held under universal suffrage, 68.5% of the electorate was constitute by first-time voters, an impressive number even taking into account the youthfulness of the population; even in 1968, only 43.8% of the voting age population registered on electoral rolls and only 33.9% actually cast a vote).

As a result, the PSE rapidly became a traditional party like other ones, where ideology mattered little, a phenomenon reinforced by a cascade of splits all long the 1960s and 1970s. Tellingly, in 1978, the PSE initially supported the candidacy of Sixto Durán-Ballén and only drop their support to the PSC candidate when this latter dared not selecting the PSE’s pick as his running-mate.

After having losing registration, the PSE regained legal status in the 1980s and, since then, has managed to avoid a disappearance by whoring itself at each presidential election to a non-member national and decently popular political leader by providing him an electoral vehicle: Frank Vargas Pazzos in 1988, León Roldós in 1992; Freddy Ehlers in 1996 and 1998; León Roldós again in 2002 and Rafael Correa in 2006 (after a support to the Gutiérrez administration in 2004-05).

The presidency of Correa provoked a long-lasting feud inside the Socialist Party-Broad Front (PS-FA, the name of the party between 1995 and 2014 in the wake of the reunification with the moribund FADI communist party) between supporters and opponents of Correa with party congress routinely ending into brawls. The party nevertheless experienced a resurgence at local levels, during the local elections of 2014 when campaigning as ‘the other party of the presidential majority’ (Avanza used the same gimmick) hence attracting voters disappointed with Correa but not disappointed enough to vote for a party openly in the opposition.

In August 2019, the anti-Correa wing took control of the party leadership, with the support of the Moreno administration, and installed Enrique Ayala, a former dean of the Simón Bolívar Andean University, as its new national president. Under the leadership of Ayala, the PSE dropped out its revolutionary socialist gimmick to adopt ‘new left’ (im)postures (proclaiming being ‘the first ecologist and feminist party in Ecuador’). For the 2021 elections, it made an electoral alliance (‘Honesty Alliance’) with César Montúfar’s Concertación, a center-right anti-corruption party, and nominated Fernando Villavicencio as its top candidate on the national list. The alliance only elected two assemblymen (Villavicencio and a PSE candidate for a seat in Zamora Chinchipe). And now, while Villavicencio is campaigning for the ‘yes’ to all eight referendum questions, the PSE is campaign for a rejection of all questions while also having nominated (or try to nominate) questionable candidates in the local elections like Pedro Freile or Hector Vanegas.

The PSE leadership is heavily dominated by academics and, while it used to have ties with the FENOCIN campesino organization, the relationship between the two organizations seems to have collapsed.



In that regard, the map of the Honesty Alliance (which share many similarities with the ID map) is pretty indicative: a list that received 13.8% in Rumipamba but only 5.2% in Comité del Pueblo or 3.2% in Guamaní in Quito and 5.2% in La Puntilla but only 1.4% in Pascuales in Guayaquil area can hardly been described as a list appealing to conventional left-wing voters nor to low-income electors. Clearly, the Honesty Alliance got the vast majority of its voters thanks to its Concertación component (receiving its best results among urban upper-classes) while the PSE component didn't bring much voters. Probably, a cause of concern for the future of the PSE.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #9 on: February 03, 2023, 04:39:03 PM »

The remaining parties/movements haven’t even a semblance of ideology (or no longer have one) – all of them but SUMA and AMIGO are posturing as ‘center-left’ – nor a real voting base. Hence why I didn’t bother making maps of their 2021 results, not only because of the very poor results these parties obtained but also because this is really a strong performance in a few cantons thanks to one or a few local caciques running for a seat in the National Assembly on the national or provincial lists: Quevedo, Los Ríos for the then-Alianza PAIS (César Litardo); El Carmen, Manabí for Construye (former mayor Hugo Cruz); Buena Fe, Los Ríos (the local Mendoza dynasty) and Tulcán, Carchi (former mayor Pedro Velasco) for Avanza; Azogues, Cañar (former mayor Virgilio Saquicela) and San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro (the two cantons are headed by mayors belong to the party) for Democracia Sí; Portoviejo, Manabí (the birthplace of its presidential candidate, Guillermo Celi, who served there in as a local administrator) and Píllaro, Tungurahua (mayor Patricio Sarabia) for SUMA.

The interesting thing about these parties is however that most of them, in spite of having roots in the highlands (Alianza PAIS, Avanza) and, more especially Quito (SUMA, Construye, Democracia Sí), either because their founders built all their careers there either because this was where their voting base was originally to be found, have moved from parties doing better in the Sierra to parties doing better in the Costa and from predominantly urban parties (bar maybe Avanza) to parties over-performing in a few selected rural/remote rural cantons while being absolutely obliterated in the urban centers.

Democratic, Revolutionary, Ethical and Green Movement (MOVER)

Party’s list number: 35
Number of members and affiliates: 987,761

Prefects elected in 2019: 2 (all in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 27 (incl. 17 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 8 (incl. 5 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 32 (all in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen (as Alianza PAIS): 2.8% (Costa: 3.5%; Sierra: 2.0%; Oriente: 1.7%; Galápagos: 1.6%; expats: 1.9%)

MOVER (whose acronym means ‘move’ and is formed from five blatant lies) is the rebranded version of the old Alianza PAIS, which, after having been purged in 2018 of its pro-Correa elements, has expelled Moreno from its ranks in the aftermath of the 2021 disastrous results (not a single legislator elected).

The party, whose local infrastructure has been left devastated by the 2019 elections (after already bad results in 2014 when it lost the major urban centers, probably the turning point from which things went downhill for Correa’s party), is now controlled by a clique of people having supported both the Correa and Moreno administration, an absolutely toxic combo for just about every Ecuadorian voter. The number of candidates it runs is speaking for itself: this is a dying party with few remaining cadres which will struggle to survive this election in spite of the hopeless, insincere and not credible redesign as an environmentalist moderate center-left party.

Avanza Party (Avanza)

Party’s list number: 8
Number of members and affiliates: 176,493

Prefects elected in 2019: 1 (in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 8 (incl. 3 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 12 (incl. 7 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 73 (incl. 41 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 1.9% (Costa: 2.3%; Sierra: 1.5%; Oriente: 1.1%; Galápagos: 1.0%; expats: 2.0%)

Avanza (‘move forward’) has been established in 2012 as a social-democratic satellite party of Alianza PAIS by Ramiro González, a former high official of the ID who then served as the president of the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS) in the Correa administration. In practice, it mostly served as a way to recycle a lot of old-timers from the ID, the PRE (Marco Proaño, the running-mate of Abdalá Bucaram in the 1992 presidential election; Saruka Rodríguez, whose name later appeared in a case of political financing by drug cartels) or Pachakutik as well as various frivolous politicians (like singer Gerardo Morán ‘El Más Querido’ previously elected a legislator for a provincial party), all considered as too much tainted or weak to be part of the ruling Alianza PAIS.

Using the money and resources of the IESS (like the display of ambulances in political meetings), González managed to elect five assemblymen in 2013 and, the following year, Avanza emerged as the second largest political force at local level when it elected 34 mayors thanks to a campaign broadly similar to the one of the Socialist Party (i.e. presenting itself as ‘the other party of the majority’).

Then things went downhill. González, who had presidential ambitions, broke with Correa going as far as publicly accusing of being financed by the Isaías brothers (two bankers who fled to Miami after their bank went bankrupted in 2001 and the embodiment of the corrupt Guayaquil oligarchy) before having to flee to Peru in August 2017 to avoid being arrested for illegal enrichment.

Under the new leadership of Álvaro Castillo, the mayor of Ibarra (Imbabura), the party scored a massive defeat in the 2019 locals when it only returned 8 mayors. In the 2021 presidential election, it ran as a presidential candidate Isidro Romero, a particularly loathsome oligarch, who made a point on focusing his attacks on Guillermo Lasso (presumably for some old personal beef or economic dispute) and offering the most demagogic and unrealistic platform imaginable (mostly oriented towards xenophobia and penal populism with stuff like expulsion of all Venezuelans and forced labor for criminals). A platform which could hardly been described as ‘social-democratic’ and didn't convinced voters as Romero only received 1.9% (still the seventh best-placed candidate) while Avanza elected only two assemblymen.

Like for MOVER, but at a less important extent, Avanza has saw a collapse of its local infrastructure and has only been able to run candidates of a third of all cantons.

United Society for More Action Party (SUMA)

Party’s list number: 23
Number of members and affiliates: 149,295

Prefects elected in 2019: 2 (incl. 1 in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 13 (incl. 6 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 17 (incl. 13 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 155 (incl. 123 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 1.7% (Costa: 1.8%; Sierra: 1.5%; Oriente: 2.1%; Galápagos: 5.2%; expats: 1.0%)

The SUMA Movement has been established in May 2012 as a moderate and liberal center-right party by two young politicians, Mauricio Rodas, a former vice-president of the PSC youth movement, and Guillermo Celi, a former PSP candidate for prefect of Manabí.

Running on a platform advocating an end of political polarization in Ecuador, Rodas placed four out of eight candidates in the 2013 presidential election, receiving 3.9% of the votes, a relative success due to the candidate’s appeal to urban professionals and upper middle-classes in Quito, unhappy with the other right-wing candidates (Lasso is a banker from Guayaquil; Gutiérrez a cholo military officer from an Amazon province; and Noboa a banana tycoon from the Costa and a weirdo).

Building on that success, Rodas was elected mayor of Quito in 2014, defeating in a landslide the Alianza PAIS incumbent. However, the inexperienced and unprepared Rodas administration rapidly turned into a trainwreck as exemplified by the almost immediate division of the SUMA group in the metropolitan council, the abandonment of a project to build a cable railway and the considerable delays in the construction of the capital’s subway (still not completed on this day). The largely unreadable strategy of SUMA, oscillating between opposition and cautious support to the Correa administration, didn’t helped things.

In the 2017 general elections, SUMA endorsed Lasso as its presidential candidate while running joint lists with CREO, an alliance which enabled the party to gain eight seats in the legislature. By early 2018, the alliance with CREO had already collapsed and the following year, the by-then widely unpopular Rodas (by then also facing allegations of corruption) renounced to run for reelection; SUMA, which didn’t even ran a candidate in the race for mayor of Quito, losing that very visible and important position.

Under Celi, the successor of Rodas (who had retired from politics) at the head of SUMA, the party shifted to the right, making alliance with local evangelical groups and expressing its opposition to legalization of abortion in case of rape. This has proved insufficient to relaunch the party which lost its parliamentary representation in the 2021 election. In the presidential Celi did hardly better receiving only 0.9% of the vote after a largely unremarkable campaign.

The party seems to have however persisted in its social conservative turn as its candidate for mayor of Pujilí (a rural and indigenous canton in Cotopaxi) made headlines this week for having made a deranged rant against homosexuals (with a lot of religious undertones) during a political meeting. He has since apologized.

Daniel Noboa, a provincial assemblyman from Santa Elena (elected for the now defunct United Ecuadorian Movement) and the son of Álvaro Noboa, has recently approached SUMA, and throw his support behind the movement’s candidates in Santa Elena, in what may be an attempt to take over the declining party.

Democratic Center (CD)

Party’s list number: 1
Number of members and affiliates: 188,309

Prefects elected in 2019: 2 (all in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 14 (incl. 1 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 18 (incl. 12 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 153 (incl. 112 in alliance)

The Democratic Center was founded in 2012 as a Guayas provincial party in order to support the reelection bid of Jimmy Jairala, a media businessman and radio host, firstly elected prefect of Guayas in 2009 as a PSP candidate (supported by the PSC), but then allied to the Correa government.

In 2016, the CD was transformed into a nationwide party and quickly thereafter dumped Correa to become part of the ID-PK-UP led left-wing ANC opposition alliance. After having supported the ANC candidate, Paco Moncayo, in the 2017 presidential first round, the CD betrayed its allies and endorsed Moreno in the runoff. This move was rewarded with ministerial posts in the subsequent Moreno government but, in March 2020, as elections were coming, the CD suddenly realized that Moreno's neoliberal policies were awful and left the sinking ship to go back in the opposition. As you see, political loyalty isn’t the main quality of Jairala, a politician that Correa criticized as an ‘opportunist’ in 2016.

The CD subsequently brokered a deal with Correa (whose FCS party was threatened with deregistration due to problems with the signatures previously used to register the party under its first leader) to set up a joint alliance (the UNES) in the 2021 general elections.

The UNES alliance has however since collapsed over Jairala’s insistence on running for a third time for mayor of Guayaquil (he previously ran for that office in 2004 as the PRE candidate and in 2019 as the CD candidate) and refusal to be sidelined in favor of a RC candidate.

In addition to Jairala, who is said to control through testaferros (front-men) a small media empire, the CD is tied to some sectors of the Guayaquil business community. The party’s president, Enrique Menoscal, has been criticized by supporters of Lasso during the 2021 campaign for appearing as the owner of several companies in the Panama's business register and for alleged connections with the Isaías Brothers (the cheerleaders of Lasso attacking Correísmo for Menoscal’s companies registered in tax havens and connections with big banks was both very ironic and very hypocritical). The secretary-general of CD happens to be the legal representative of Jairala’s radio station.

Construye Movement (MC25)

Party’s list number: 25
Number of members and affiliates: unknown

Candidates for prefects: 13 (incl. 12 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 118 (incl. 110 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 0.7% (Costa: 0.8%; Sierra: 0.7%; Oriente: 0.6%; Galápagos: 0.3%; expats: 0.6%)

The Construye (‘build’) Movement is the new name used since 2020 (in addition with white, blue and orange in replacement of the white, purple and cyan colors previously used) by the political movement previously known as Ruptura 25 (R25).

R25 was founded in 2004 by a group of young left-wing activists, claiming to be inspired by New Left ideals and advocating a renewal of Ecuadorian democracy (the 25 is a reference to the 25th anniversary of return of democracy). The leader of the group was María Paula Romo (also then aged 25), a self-described feminist and the niece of a PRE congressman expelled from the legislature in 1997 over a major corruption scandal (Red Peñaranda). Romo and the R25 participated in the 2005 Quito protests that led to the removal of President Gutiérrez before throwing their support behind Rafael Correa. In 2007, Romo and several of her R25 friends were elected a constituent legislators on the Alianza PAIS-led lists.

In 2011, R25 broke with Correa over the organization of the 2011 referendum claiming it strengthened the presidentialist and authoritarian direction of the government. Two years, it participated to its first elections, advocating the legalization of abortion and soft drugs, defense of LGBT rights and environment-friendly policies. The movement failed to win a single seat in spite of having designated former Quito mayor and ID leader Paco Moncayo as its top candidate on the national list. It presidential candidate, Norman Wray, received only 1.2%. It subsquently decided to boycott the 2014 local elections, arguing of an alleged unfairness of the poll, a move that conducted to its deregistration by the CNE for a failure to meet the minimal voting support requirements.

R25 reemerged in August 2018 when Romo was appointed by Moreno the interior minister (later government minister with expanded powers) and quickly became the most important and influential government member in spite of not having parliamentary representation to the point of displacing the declining Alianza PAIS as the main driving force in the government: R25 members were appointed at key posts like Juan Sebastián Roldán as secretary-general of the presidency or Iván Granda (also the husband of Romo) as minister for social and economic inclusion. Thanks to interference of Romo in the CNE, the R25 obtained the cancelation its 2015 de-registration and the restoration of its legal political movement status without the organization of a signature collection (hence why the number of its members is now unknown).

As the almighty government minister (until her impeachment by the National Assembly in November 2020), Romo betrayed all the principles she pretended to have previously stood for. She led the violent crackdown on the 2019 indigenous protests and ordered the arrest of Ola Bini (a Swedish Internet privacy activist) in the wake of the expulsion of Assange from the London’s embassy and irrational panic over 'spying' and got him prosecuting for dubious charges (he has been acquitted from all charges this week, after four years in a judicial hell). She also proved unable to advance the case for abortion legalization and was exposed as the main architect of a corruption scheme (based on the distribution of posts and contracts in public hospitals) to enable the government having a majority in the National Assembly.

After Romo’s removal and departure for the United States, the R25, left without a visible leader and tainted by the toxic legacy of Romo and association with Moreno, rebranded itself as Construye. In the 2021 general elections, it elected only one assemblyman (who joined the pro-government caucus) while its presidential candidate, Juan Fernando Velasco, a pop singer who had previously served as culture minister under Moreno, received only 0.8% of the vote.

The movement is now totally discredited and, ironically, undistinguishable from the old parties it pretended to fight and displace at the time of its foundation. It is also of course lacking a platform (having dropped out the social liberal niche it previously filled) and strong candidates and will never recaptured the socially liberal/anti-authoritarian urban voting it, very partially, seduced in 2013.

Democracia Sí (MDS or DSI)

Party’s list number: 20
Number of members and affiliates: 222,112

Prefects elected in 2019: 4 (all in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 30 (incl. 22 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 15 (incl. 9 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 100 (incl. 75 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen: 1.0% (Costa: 1.1%; Sierra: 1.0%; Oriente: 0.8%; Galápagos: 0.4%; expats: 0.7%)

Democracia Sí has been established in 2015 as a humanist and ecologist movement (hence the use of a heart in the movement’s logo) and officially registered in 2018.

It is largely functioning as the personal vehicle of its founder and leader, Gustavo Larrea, a veteran politician with a long but quite controversial career. The son of a minister under Velasco Ibarra and the brother of a 2006 minor leftist presidential candidate, Larrea jumped into politics as a member of the Revolutionary Student Front where he befriended Lenín Moreno (the careers of both men are closely connected) during protests against the military dictatorship. Later he became involved in the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a far-left movement whose several members joined the ill-fated ‘Alfaro Vive Carajo!’ urban guerrilla which committed hold-ups in the 1980s before being brutally repressed by the Febres-Cordero administration. Larrea himself always denied having participated into illegal activities.

In the 1980s, Larrea became a member of the Ecuadorian Revolutionary Popular Action (APRE), a left-wing nationalist and populist party led by Frank Vargas Pazzos, the leader of a military mutiny against Febres-Cordero. In 1994, he was elected a deputy for Pichincha for the APRE and, two years later, followed Vargas in the Bucaram administration, serving as an under-secretary in the Interior Ministry and employing Moreno as an administrative director.

The removal of Bucaram in the middle of widespread protests and the subsequent disintegration of the APRE led Larrea to temporary withdraw from politics to dedicate to work in human rights organizations; he was later accused of having exaggerated and embellished his activities in said organizations notably by pretending having received an nonexistent international prize

Larrea resurfaced in politics in 2006 as one of the founders of the Alianza PAIS; it has been reported he was the one who suggested to Correa the name of Moreno as a running-mate for the 2006 presidential election.

After the victory of Correa, Larrea was appointed a minister for government and police, making him the most important political operative of the new president. In that post, he maneuvered to obtain the summoning of a Constituent Assembly by the Congress, using dubious practices (buying of parliamentary votes; expulsion of 57 legislators and swearing-in of their substitutes) to reach such result. After having been moved to the ministry of External and Internal Security, Larrea was caught in a scandal after the revelations in Colombian press of presumed ties with the FARC and drug cartels (through a former employee of Larrea’s human right organization who was hired in the government ministry). The allegations have never been formally established and there has been no judicial consequences for Larrea.

In 2009, Larrea, disillusioned with Correa, resigned from the government and left the Alianza PAIS to join the ranks of the left-wing opposition, trying unsuccessfully to get nominate the 2013 presidential candidate of the PK-MPD alliance. The election of Moreno and his rapid rupture with Correa enabled Larrea to regain some political influence as he became one of the secret advisers of the new president even if his actual role may have been exaggerated.

Larrea obtained the registration of his Democracia Sí, in order to support the Moreno administration, and the new party scored a pretty strong result in the 2019 local elections, electing the prefect of Santo Domingo (who has since left and is running for reelection as a RC candidate) and supporting the victorious candidate for mayor in Cuenca (who has since left).

Larrea’s presidential bid in 2021 was however an unmitigated disaster as the old politician received only 0.4% of the vote after which he endorsed Lasso in the runoff; his party elected a single assemblyman, Virgilio Saquicela, a former Pachakutik member and CREO mayor of Azogues, who joined the pro-government bench and became the first vice-president of the National Assembly. Saquicela later ascended to the presidency of the legislature after having dumped the government and conspiring with the RC and the PSC. He is apparently still a member of Democracia Sí in spite of having campaigned for the local RC candidates in his Cañar province.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #10 on: February 03, 2023, 06:03:09 PM »

RETO Movement

Party’s list number: 33
Number of members and affiliates: 173,609

Prefects elected in 2019: 3 (all in alliance)
Mayors elected in 2019: 20 (incl. 17 in alliance)

Candidates for prefects: 17 (incl. 3 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 137 (incl. 118 in alliance)

Results in the 2021 election of national assemblymen (as Alianza PAIS): 0.5% (Costa: 0.4%; Sierra: 0.5%; Oriente: 0.5%; Galápagos: 0.5%; expats: 0.5%)

Founded in 2019 under the name of Juntos Podemos National Movement and renamed RETO Movement (with the acronym meaning ‘challenge’ also standing for ‘Total Renovation’) in 2022, it is a party a bit similar to the CD as it started as the personal movement of a provincial prefect, in this case Paúl Carrasco, the prefect of Azuay between 2005 and 2018. Originally elected as the candidate of the ID, Carrasco later left to found its own local provincial movement (Democratic Encounter Movement later renamed Participa) and was reelected in 2009, while also endorsed by Alianza PAIS. In 2013, Carrasco had turned into an opponent to Correa, notably over the support of the president to mega-mining in Azuay, a sensitive issue in the province where there are vivid memory of the 1993 La Josefina disaster, a landslide provoked by carrying and mining activities and led to the deaths of about 150 persons.

Just before the 2017 general elections, Carrasco departed to the left-wing opposition ranks to join the (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to unite CREO and the PSC behind a single presidential candidacy. Barred from running for reelection as prefect in 2019, Carrasco opted for running for mayor of Cuenca. He then placed only fourth with 14.6%, the sign of a rapid declining popularity induced by his zigzagging political allegiances.

Having registered a movement at national level, probably thanks to dubious means (the registration was challenged for a time for alleged irregularities), Carrasco ran for president in 2021 and made the choice of focusing his campaign on the issue of Venezuelan migrants, using a rhetoric with strong xenophobic undertones. A choice that didn’t pay off as Carrasco ended last out of sixteen candidates, receiving a miserable 0.2% (19,809 votes, eight times less than the number of his party’s registered supporters) and a humiliating 0.5% of the vote in the province he had led during thirteen years.

After Carrasco had withdrawn from active politics to instead... make videos on Youtube about motels in Cuenca, the Juntos Podemos movement was rebranded as the RETO Movement with new colors and a new leadership (the current national president is apparently a businessman from Guayas who was active in Ruptura 25). However, when the designation of candidates for the 2023 locals happened, it was... Paúl Carrasco who was nominated as the movement’s candidate for mayor of Cuenca. So much for the ‘total renovation’.

People, Equality and Democracy Movement (PID)

Party’s list number: 4
Number of members and affiliates: 239,088

Candidates for prefects: 11 (incl. 6 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 70 (incl. 49 in alliance)

A new movement which managed to register last year, just few days before the closing of registrations to participate in the 2023 locals. Masquerading as a ‘moderate center-left’ organization, this is a movement led by Arturo Moreno, a cousin of the former president. Which is making the third Ecuadorian party led by a relative of Moreno after the late United Ecuadorian Movement (led by Lenín’s brother, Edwin) and Libertad es Pueblo (led by Gary, another brother of Lenín). In an interview gave to Primicias, Arturo Moreno has ensured the PID is totally unrelated to the three Moreno brothers and that it has been registered thanks to support from ‘social leaders’ and that the collection of the signatures ‘didn’t cost [them] money’.

The PID is functioning just exactly like the parties of the Moreno Bros: as a mean for politicians from all over the political spectrum to get access to the ballot. Previously, the United Ecuadorian Movement nominated as its presidential candidate a far-right evangelical pastor who spread anti-vax messages and got Daniel Noboa elected to the National Assembly while Libertad es Pueblo nominated as a legislative candidate Fernando Balda, a far-right lunatic. Both were however pretending to be ‘center-left’.

But if you find I exaggerate somewhat by describing many Ecuadorian political parties as non-ideological and scams, let me introduce to...

Independent Mobilizing Action Generating Opportunities Movement (AMIGO)

Party’s list number: 16
Number of members and affiliates: 221,469

Candidates for prefects: 10 (incl. 5 in alliance)
Candidates for mayors: 85 (incl. 52 in alliance)

AMIGO, stylized as ‘AM16O’ has been officially registered by the CNE on February 2020 despite no sign about a ground campaign to collect signatures in favor of the movement and no indication about the new movement’s leader or political orientation. After six months, the medias discovered that the mysterious movement, whose whose ‘national headquarters’ was a pretty shoddy apartment in Esmeraldas City and whose directors couldn’t be reached with the phone numbers provided to the CNE, had been actually founded by Daniel Mendoza. This one, a young assemblyman had been elected in Manabí as the candidate of an alliance between the Alianza PAIS and the party of the former prefect of the province, a political opportunist was oscillated between support and opposition to Correa and was then facing accusations of corruption. At the time of the medias revelations, Mendoza was investigated over a case of corruption related to the building of a hospital in Pedernales (northern Manabí); he would subsequently be sentenced to jail. It has been widely suspected that the CNE approved the registration of AMIGO in exchange of Mendoza’s alternate voting against the starting of removal proceedings against the president of the CNE, Diana Atamaint (who is still in office, by the way): AMIGO was approved as a national movement just three days after the vote.

With Mendoza behind the bars, the future of AMIGO was very uncertain but, in August
2020, it was announced the movement would run as its presidential candidate for the next election a largely unknown right-wing activist named Pedro Freile. By his own account, Freile would have elaborated a government platform with friends and, after having unsuccessfully tried to propose it to various parties, he reached AMIGO where the movement’s directors not only agreed to endorse his platform but also gave him the reins of the movement. AMIGO renounced to run candidates in the legislative elections, officially to protest the corruption of the National Assembly, possibly because it hadn’t enough names to constitute full lists.

Freile campaigned on a platform advocating privatizations and legalization of marijuana and abortion in case of rape while also making a wide use of an anti-establishment and anti-party rhetoric. He surprisingly placed fifth (with 2.1%, but still) and surpassed a number of veteran politicians also running in the race. A result explained by his good performance in the debates and his ability to channel protest vote. Freile got his best results in the cities of the highlands (not too dissimilar to Rodas’s results in 2013) as well as in Carchi.

Two years later, Freile has abandoned the AMIGO movement after a harsh struggle with another internal faction over the control of the organization.

A quick glance at AMIGO’s website is, uh, not giving a good impression of the movement because such kind of stuff is quite disturbing for an organization that is supposed to have more registered supporters than CREO, Pachakutik, the RC, the PSC or the ID:



Yes, this totally sound like photos taken in Ecuador (there are many of this kind of pictures, probably coming from photo stocks and you would rather imagined on prospectus for insurance or financial investments aimed at North American market).

Even more surreal: when you click on the ‘causes’ section on the main page, you are directed to a webpage now labeled as ‘campaign principles’ (in English) with a succession of items seemingly designating a series of political topics. When you click on one of them you have this gibberish written in pseudo-Latin appearing:



This same exact text with the same ‘Jobs and Economy’ designation is appearing for every topics on that section, be it ‘crescimiento económico’, ‘emprendimiento digital’, ‘educación de vanguardia’, ‘education’ and ‘women’s equality’ (yeah, they didn’t even bother translating the latest two in Spanish). The only ‘normal’ parts of the website are announcements of internal processes (the only updated section apparently) and a shop where goodies with the movement’s symbol and color are sold.

Some sections are unreachable because of the bad design of the website (notably the ‘ideological principles’, ‘directions’ and ‘contact us’ sections but I’m afraid this may be intentional) while ‘our history’ is only indicating a shockingly divisive stance: ‘We will work for a state that educates our children, cares for our elders, and provides a safe, healthy and prosperous community for all of us’. (again written in English).

Seems the website has been built around a template for generic US candidates but this isn’t explaining why it hasn’t been completed since at least about a year (according to archive.org) if not even more (a 2020 Primicias article was already mentioning that the website, that subsequently went offline, was filled with non-genuine content).

Who is actually behind the AMIGO movement is kind of mystery (can’t find much about its current national president besides the fact he is running for mayor of Marcebelí, a 5,000-inhabitants rural canton in El Oro). It currently serves now as an electoral vehicle for candidates of all stripes (a founder of Alianza PAIS fallen in disgrace with Correa in Quito; in alliance with Pachakutik in Cotopaxi and with the RC in Esmeraldas; it tried to run as a candidate the incumbent prefect of Zamora Chinchipe, a former Pachakutik legislator and opponent to Correa close to Villavicencio, but this was rejected by the CNE).
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #11 on: February 04, 2023, 03:21:54 PM »

Now going into details for the most important/most interesting local races.

Quito (mayor)

This year, there are twelve candidates running, down from eighteen in 2019 when Jorge Yunda was elected as the candidate of the Ecuadorian Union with 21.4% against 18.4% for Luisa Maldonado, the Correísta candidate, 17.8% for former mayor Paco Moncayo (ID/MDS) and 16.9% for César Montúfar (Concertación). The CREO candidate, Juan Carlos Holguín (currently the foreign minister) received 6.9% of the vote, the PSC candidate 3.5% and the Pachakutik candidate only 1.1%.

Candidates:

Jorge Yunda (‘Juntos por la Gente’: PK+PID+MOVER). Hailing from Guano, a tiny canton in the central highlands province of Chimborazo, Yunda went to Quito at 7 and received there a training as a surgeon. After having also been the member of a pop music group (Sahiro), Yunda started working as a radio host under the alias of ‘Loro Homero’. He also then began building a radio empire he is reported to control through relatives and frontmen; according to the media watchdog NGO Fundamedios, Yunda was in 2017 the direct or indirect owner of at least five radio companies and 35 radio frequencies, mostly located in Quito.

The first foray into politics of Yunda took place in 2007 when he was appointed by President Correa as the president of the National Council for Radio and Television (CONARTEL), the entity in charge of regulating medias. He has been accused of having used that position to consolidate and extend his own media empire. He resigned from that job in 2009 but was included in 2013 on the Alianza PAIS’s national list for legislative elections at an ineligible position (spot #12). In 2017, he led the Alianza PAIS’s list in Pichincha’s second electoral district (covering the southern, more popular, part of urban Quito) and was elected an assemblyman. In January 2018, it was reported Yunda had left the Alianza PAIS to join the Democratic Center.

In December 2018, he resigned his seat in the parliament to run for mayor of Quito as the candidate of the Ecuadorian Union, a fake party owned by a former attorney-general under Correa, and was surprisingly elected thanks to his strong following in the low-income neighborhoods of southern Quito, defeating the candidate sponsored by Correa as well as Paco Moncayo, whose all polls gave victorious.

The Yunda administration proved controversial. Firstly, his low-profile during the October 2019 indigenous protests (which led to material destruction and the arson of the comptroller-general’s office) raise accusations among right-wing medias and politicians of connivance with the protesters.  More importantly, suspicions of graft in the procurement by the metropolitan district of 100,000 Covid-19 test kits led to the opening of an investigation against Yunda and to his formal indictment for embezzlement in April 2021. Subsequent revelations in the medias uncovered the existence of a cloudy and corrupt mechanism to manage and distribute the municipality’s public contracts head by the mayor’s own son (Sebastián Yunda, a pop singer with no official position) and brother-in-law.

In June 2021, the Metropolitan Council voted the removal from office of Yunda (the first time a municipal council voted the removal of the mayor in Ecuador) and sworn in the vice-mayor, a right-winger elected for the party than Yunda, as the new head of the DMQ. A Pichincha court canceled the vote in July 2021 and reinstalled Yunda but, two months later, the Constitutional Court reversed this ruling and ordered the definitive removal of Yunda.

In spite of being still indicted in the test kits case and forced to wear an electronic tagging, Yunda is intending to be elected a second time as mayor of Quito. Remembering he has indigenous ancestry, he is claiming being the victim of political persecution motivated by racism and classism (a claim that could received some ground after the very recent acquittals of the Sebastián Yunda’s co-accused even if the son of the ex-mayor is still a justice fugitive, presumably now living in Argentina) and has received the endorsement of Pachakutik, MOVER and the PID in his bid.

The campaign of Yunda has been centered around the selling of a candidate coming from a humble background, who is close to ordinary people and is dedicated to the defense of the poorest as well as the defense of abandoned animals (Yunda’s personal refuge for dogs is often featured in his electoral propaganda). The candidacy of the former mayor, who is heading most polls, is sustained by a skillful communication, the support of Yunda’s radios – in first place Radio Canela, one of the most popular radio stations –, a real synergy with the Pachakutik infrastructure and the movement’s candidate for prefect of Pichincha and the organization of concerts featuring Yunda’s musician friends and the projection of a eulogistic documentary (‘Mi destino es como el viento’) about the life of Yunda (his stint as a Correísta assemblyman being however omitted in the movie).

Speculations over the possibility Yunda couldn’t serve as mayor even if elected have arisen in last days as Yunda has been sentenced in 2022 by the TCE to a forfeiture of his civic rights for two years for having irregularly try to remain mayor after the vote that remove him from office; Yunda has appealed the ruling which should be reexamined in the next weeks.

Pabel Muñoz (RC). A loyal supporter of Correa (being one of the only three candidates with Natasha Rojas and Pablo Ponce to have do all his political career inside the same political tendency), Muñoz has the typical profile of the technocratic ministers in the Correa administration: a graduate in sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE) and from the Buenos Aires University in Argentina, Muñoz came to politics during the 2005 protests in Quito against the Gutiérrez administration. An early supporter of Correa, he held various positions in his successive administrations, notably in the National Secretariat for Planning and Development (SENPLADES) he led from 2013 to 2015. In 2019, the comptroller-general established that Muñoz, as the head of the SENPLADES, has been co-responsible of a $34 million prejudice for the state in the decision to open an air route to New York by the public TAME airline company, approved without a technical evaluation and plagued with irregularities. Muñoz has appealed the comptroller-general’s report.

Between 2009 and 2010, Muñoz also served as the secretary-general for planning in the Quito municipality then headed by an Alianza PAIS mayor. In 2015, he was designated by Correa to organize the ‘dialogues for equity and justice’, instituted in the wake of the massive protests against the introduction of new taxes.

Elected in 2017 an Alianza PAIS assemblyman from Pichincha’s first electoral district (covering northern urban Quito that included the wealthiest and whitest parishes but also the poorest Comité del Pueblo parish), Muñoz was elected to chair the National Assembly’s commission for economic regime. He hesitated a little before taking a side in the Correa/Moreno feud, deciding finally to support the exiled former president. After having played a leading role in the 2021 campaign of Arauz and having been reelected an assemblyman (but in the third electoral district, covering the suburban and rural parts of the canton of Quito), Muñoz conducted the negotiations with Nebot and the representatives of CREO in order to establish the parliamentary agreement President Lasso subsequently choose to disregard at the last minute.

Having resigned his parliamentary seat to run for mayor, Muñoz is campaigning on the nostalgia from the Correa years among certain popular sectors, exploiting the unpopularity of the Lasso administration and using his academic background and government experience to present himself as the competent and serious (in contrast with Yunda’s populist candidacy) alternative candidate. In an irony of history, Muñoz has endorsed the Quito sin minería campaign, gathering signatures to organize a referendum on the prohibition of mining in the Chocó Andino wildlife reserve (northwest part of the canton of Quito), an issue Yunda, the candidate supported by Pachakutik, has largely ignored.

Andrés Páez (‘Quito Vuelve’: PSP+MDS). A graduate from jurisprudence and sociology from the PUCE and a lawyer for 30 years, Páez became involved in politics as an ID candidate for Pichincha provincial counselor in the 1990s. A vice-prefect of Pichincha under Ramiro González (2000-02), Páez served as an assemblyman for the ID between 2002 and 2009. The president of the self-described social-democratic party between 2007 and 2009, he advocated a hard line against President Correa, provoking a rift inside the ID. Having left the party, Páez was elected a CREO assemblyman in 2013 in Pichincha’s first district and became a vocal critic of the corruption inside the Correa government. Selected the running-mate of Lasso in the 2017 presidential election, he participated into protests to denounce alleged frauds in the runoff.

After having departed from CREO and temporarily withdrawn from politics, Páez founded his political movement (Nosostros) and was mentioned as a potential candidate in the 2021 presidential election, as the incarnation of a strongly anti-Correa and pretty right-wing candidacy. Páez had been embroiled in 2020 in a pretty bizarre scandal of supposed negotiations with Mayor Jorge Yunda over the trading of Páez’s political support in exchange of contracts for a passenger transport company which would be used to finance Páez’s political party. The case, rumored to have been weaponized by Fernando Balda, a rival of Páez for the far-right vote, had been quickly forgotten but has conveniently resurfaced just few days before the election.

Páez has tried to exploit the resent of the whitest/wealthiest sectors in Quito against the 2019 and 2022 indigenous protests, promising notably the introduction of a ‘license’ to demonstrate in the capital and pledging that, if elected, LGBT organizations wouldn’t be able to enter any school.

Nonetheless, his campaign has been pretty bad and it seems that Freile has overtaken him as the leading right-wing candidate. The fact that the communication of Páez is absolutely disastrous with the release of cringe TikTok videos: one to supposedly answer allegations of alcoholism made against him along the line ‘I drink a beer every now and then like everybody but at least they can’t me called a thief’ but misinterpreted as ‘better being an alcoholic than a thief’:



Another one where he is appearing with a painted face in reference to Braveheart and Joker movies:



Pedro Freile (‘Frente Unidos, Incluyentes y Organizados’: PSE+SUMA) Freile is a lawyer specialized in public contracting who appeared on the Ecuadorian political scene in 2020 when nominated the presidential candidate of AMIGO. As previously mentioned, he has since left said movement and, after having signed the far-right Madrid Charter and defended the decision of the basilica of Quito to prohibit transsexual men from taking pictures of themselves in the vicinity of the building, he is now posturing as a liberal and a defender of LGBT rights with the support of a bizarre alliance between the Socialist Party and SUMA.

Freile’s campaign has absolutely no ideological backbone with proposals being randomly thrown on the campaign trail and is particularly dirty, the former presidential candidate being not afraid of throwing mud on his rivals, especially against Andrés Páez (his current campaign director previously worked for Páez, making things even more nasty).

Among other things, Freile has publicly signed a commitment to respect LGBT rights, promised to decarbonize Quito’s public transportation system through the introduction of electric buses and taxis and pledged to reduce the number of advisers assigned to each metropolitan counselor. He also praised the policies of Bukele to fight organized criminality and found time to go to El Salvador meeting with the Salvadorian justice and security minister in order to determine how Bukele’s policies could be replicated them in Quito. When criticized in the television debate over his association with the Socialist Party by his PSC rival, he mentioned Churchill and Thatcher as his personal heroes.

Freile has double-downed on demagogy and attacks during the last week, giving a press conference in which he presented audios supposedly demonstrating the 2019 dirty business negotiations between Yunda and Páez while additionally threatening during a TV interview the GK news website, declaring it is part of a ‘red circle that must be eradicated from the country’s politics’. The threat was apparently the consequence of an opinion piece published in GK and questioning Freile’s lack of political consistency.

Luz Elena Coloma (‘Va por Ti’: CREO+RETO+Construye+Ahora). The candidate of the ruling party, also supported by RETO, Construye and a local right wing party, is a graduate from sociology with a long career in journalism, having written for the Hoy centrist newspaper and worked with Freddy Ehlers on the La Televisión program of reports. A member of the democratic christian DP, she served as a municipal counselor in Quito for a first period, between 2000 and 2009. After a stint (2010-16) as the general manager of the municipal company in charge of promoting tourism under Alianza PAIS mayor Augusto Barrera, shed led an NGO dedicated at training community leaders. In 2019, she was again elected a municipal counselor, as a candidate for CREO, and has been a vocal opponent to Mayor Yunda as well as a staunch defender of bullfighting, being the only counselor to not vote in favor of the elimination of public financing for bullfights. The key promise of her campaign is the massive use of drones connected to a surveillance system to hunt down thieves and criminals, on the model of supposedly successful experiments in Chili and Mexico.

Luisa Maldonado (Avanza). Maldonado served two terms as an Alianza PAIS metropolitan counselor between 2009 and 2014 before being selected as the Correísta candidate for mayor in Quito in 2019. She then placed second with 18.4% of the vote. In May 2022, she left the RC, claiming she was marginalized inside the movement and apparently despised having been pass over for a new candidacy for mayor in favor of Muñoz. She is now running as the candidate of Avanza, trying to exploit her past experience as a migrant from the rural canton of Cayambe.

María José Carrión (AMIGO). A physician by training after studies in Cuba, Carrión has been involved in social working and political organization in the barrios of Quito. A founder of Alianza PAIS in 2006, she was elected a constituent assemblywoman the following year before holding minor government jobs in areas related to education and health. In 2013, she was elected to the National Assembly as an Alianza PAIS candidate in Pichincha’s second electoral district and reelected in 2017. After having sided with Moreno in his dispute with Correa, Carrión announced her departure from the Alianza PAIS in February 2020, expressing her discontent with the party’s direction. She is heading since 2012 a foundation to help destitute persons receiving medical care. Describing herself as ‘center-left’, Carrión has came up with a ‘Bukele Plan’ to address insecurity and claimed other candidates have plagiarized it.

Pablo Ponce (ID). A former metropolitan counselor in 2003-05 and 2006-14, Ponce has the impossible task of replacing the more widely known and ‘trendy’ Inty Grønneberg (whose candidacy was rejected by the CNE) as the candidate of the orange party. In addition to having also served as the secretary-general of the Metropolitan Council between 2000 and 2002, Ponce is active in various NGOs and the associate of a legal firm. In 2019, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the CPCCS.

Patricio Alarcón (‘Orden y Seguridad para todos’: PSC+MIOS). A former president of the Quito chamber of commerce, Alarcón is running on a platform advocating a massive privatization of the municipal services (from buses to garbage collection), a massive layoff of municipal employees and a crackdown on criminals, undocumented Venezuelan migrants and informal street vendors. Supported by the local ill-named Inclusive Movement for Opportunities and Social Equity (suspected of ties with far-right organizations, including neo-nazi groups), Alarcón has been vocal against both the government and indigenous organizations, promising in 2022 that if a mayor he would blockaded the entrances to the city to prevent indigenous protesters coming in the capital.

Omar Cevallos (CD). A former Andean mountaineer and former head of the main sportive organization in Pichincha, Cevallos served as a national secretary for sports in the administration of President Palacio (2005-07) while now being active in oil business. Between 2019 and 2022, he served as a CD metropolitan councilor, opposing the administration of Yunda. Few days ago, he has announced the suspension of his candidacy and called electors to vote for Freile to prevent the election of Yunda (apparently, he has also ran out of money to finance his campaign, having spent all the sum attributed by the CNE).

Jessica Jaramillo (Movimiento Todos, lista 70). A lawyer who founds an association against gender-based violence and participated in the investigation over the 2010 unsolved murder of Gen. Jorge Gabela (possibly connected to the opposition of Gabela to the acquisition of Indian helicopters which later turned out to be defective). Jaramilla came into the spotlight in 2021 when she filed the complaint against Yunda for embezzlement in the Covid test kits scandal. She is mostly running on an anti-Yunda platform with the support of a local movement.

Natasha Rojas (UP). A longtime leftist activist who joined the MPD when a student, Rojas has chaired the Unitary Confederation of Barrios between 2010 and 2014 and participated in numerous social mobilizations, notably to oppose the administration of Correa. After a failed attempt to get elected an assemblywoman in 2017, she unsuccessfully tried to get elected a metropolitan counselor in 2019.

The next mayor of Quito should be either Yunda either Muñoz either Freile in case the right-wing voters coalesce behind his candidacy.
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« Reply #12 on: February 04, 2023, 03:45:29 PM »

Pichincha (prefect)

Candidates:

Paola Pabón (RC). A feminist lawyer who started her political career in the ID before joining Alianza PAIS in 2006. She was elected an assemblywoman for Pichincha in 2009, was reelected in 2013 and served until 2015 when she joined the Correa administration, firstly as an undersecretary for Policy Management then as a secretary for Policy Management. Confirmed in that post by Moreno, she resigned in August 2017 and remained loyal to Correa in spite of a previous political dispute over abortion; in 2013, she had been suspended from the Alianza PAIS caucus for having sponsored a motion to open a debate over legalization of abortion in case of rape, a move labeled as a ‘treason’ by Correa.

The FCS candidate in the 2019 elections, she was elected prefect of Pichincha with only 22.1% of the vote in an overcrowded race (18 candidates). In the wake of the October protests, she was investigated for ‘rebellion’ and had to wear an electronic tagging after having spent three months in jail. She has been amnestied in March 2022 after a vote of the National Assembly pardoning participants of the 2019 protests facing judicial proceedings.

The Pabón administration has had its fair share of scandals, notably the controversial commission for a fresco to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Pichincha Battle for a price of $480,000, the introduction of a tax on car registration to finance the improvement of rural roads, allegation of influence peddling in the signature of a public contract with a communication firm and accusation of embezzlement in the procurement of overpriced medical devices during the pandemic.

Anyway, Pabón is running for reelection with most polls indicated a victory of the incumbent prefect.

Guillermo Churuchumbi (‘Juntos por la Gente’: PK+PID+Mover). An indigenous activist involved in projects sponsored notably by the UNICEF and other NGOs, Churuchumbi served a the coordinator of the CONAIE team in charge of evaluating the work of the 2007-08 Constituent Assembly. In 2014, running as the candidate of Pachakutik, he was elected the first indigenous mayor of his native canton of Cayambe, the cradle of the Ecuador’s indigenous movement as it is the place where was founded the FEI in the 1940s. Reelected in 2018, Churuchumbi has been nominated the candidate of the Pachakutik-led ‘Juntos por la Gente’ alliance and hopes being elected thanks to the support of Yunda, who spared no effort to promote the former mayor of Cayambe. It is noticeable that a series of videos where the two men are appearing together in short sketches have been published on social networks; I don’t remember having seeing something similar (videos of candidates for mayor and prefect appearing together) elsewhere.

Eduardo del Pozo (‘Va por Ti’: CREO+RETO+Construye+Ahora). A lawyer in financial sector who had been elected a metropolitan counselor in Quito for CREO in 2014 and served as a vice-mayor under Rodas between 2016 and 2019. In 2016, he was sentenced to fifteen days in jail for having supposedly slandered President Correa during a radio interview. Reelected a metropolitan rural counselor in 2019, still under the banner of CREO.

Roberto Altamirano (ID). An engineer and longtime ID member who has hold executive functions in the party, he was nominated over Pablo Morales, a lawyer and the son of Wilma Andrade, an assemblywoman and a bigwig of the orange party, possibly the consequences of internal feuds in the ID.

Jacinto Espinoza (AMIGO). An Afro-Ecuadorian native from Manabí and a retired soccer goalkeeper who had been selected in the national team between 1992 and 1994. Previously tried to get elected an assemblyman in 2017 for Alianza PAIS.

Elsa Guerra (‘Frente Unidos, Incluyentes y Organizados’: PSE+SUMA). A 35-year-old self-described feminist lawyer who has been active in the Socialist Party since she was 17.

Cecilia Jaramillo (UP). An academic and feminist who served as a MPD alternate assemblywoman between 2009 and 2013.

Andrea Hidalgo (CD). A public servant who got elected in 2019 a metropolitan rural counselor in Quito for the ID and has resigned this post to be run for prefect for the CD.

Andrés Castillo (PSC). A lawyer who filed a complaint against Yunda and organized protests in 2021 to demand his resignation, filed another complaint against Leonidas Iza for ‘destruction of property and monuments’ and happens to be also the member of some masculinist group called Fundación Padres por Justicia.

Koya Shugulí (Avanza). A 32-year-old indigenous woman and a university researcher.

Gonzalo Pérez (Movimiento Todos, lista 70). A cattle rancher who had already ran for mayor of Quito in 2014 for Álvaro Noboa’s PRIAN (placing last with 0.4%) and unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the National Assembly in 2021 as a candidate of the United Ecuadorian Movement.

Daniela Zambrano (PSP+MDS). A 31-year-old woman with a degree in ‘sportive sciences’ who is making a living by selling sporting goods and was registered at the last minute.

Polls (to take with a lot of salt) seems to indicate a third-way race between Pabón, Churuchumbi and del Pozo with Pabón being the favored candidate.
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« Reply #13 on: February 05, 2023, 09:18:23 AM »

Guayaquil (mayor)

Candidates:

Cynthia Viteri (PSC-Madera de Guerrero). The daughter of the first woman to serve as the police intendant of Guayas province, Viteri has been a TV journalist in the 1990s while also serving as head of the press office in the 1996 presidential campaign of Jaime Nebot. Elected a PSC deputy to the 1997 Constituent Assembly and a congresswoman in 1998, she served in the parliament until 2006 but resigned her seat to run for president that year, as part of the PSC strategy to rebrand its image of a party of old male oligarchs by nomination an attractive blonde woman who used to be a teen mother. The strategy failed as Viteri placed only fifth with 9.6% of the vote. Returning to the parliament in 2009, she was reelected in 2013. After a second presidential bid, when she placed third with 16.3%, she was designated as the PSC candidate to succeed to Jaime Nebot as the mayor of Guayaquil in 2019 and was elected with 52.6% of the vote against 31.8% for her most-voted rival, Jimmy Jairala.

The administration of Viteri has since been a long succession of scandals. In March 2020, she ordered the blocking of the Guayaquil airport’s runway with municipal vehicles to prevent the landing of a plane arriving from Spain to evacuate European persons as a measure to avoid the propagation of Covid-19 to her city. To no avail, as Guayaquil was one of the world cities the most impacted by the pandemic, thanks to disorganization of public services and choices made by the PSC at the helm of Guayaquil since 1992 (localization of hospitals far from low-income neighborhoods; privatization of water supply to companies which neglect serving the poorest barrios) and tarnishing the image of the PSC-run Guayaquil as a model of prosperity. Followed revelations about the waste of public money in stuff like contracts for ‘aromatherapy services’ provided by a company owned by a former PSC counselor, a ‘virtual water curtain’ and the overpriced painting of famous writers’ quotes on the walls of the city. Meanwhile, one of the PSC municipality’s flagship project, the Aerovía (gondola lift system) inaugurated in 2020 to connect Guayaquil with Durán has turned out unprofitable and under-used and is currently mired into a judicial litigation with the consortium operating it. While, the installation of some 40,000 surveillance cameras by the mayor (turning Guayaquil into the world city with the third largest number of surveillance camera by inhabitant, according to Viteri) has rise concerns about privacy and proved inefficient to address the explosion of criminality. Finally, allegations were made last year by the Expreso newspaper accusing the then-husband of Viteri of having benefited from insider information to acquire lands at a cheap prices just before the announcement by the municipality of the building of major projects and allotments on said lands.

Viteri has nonetheless been renominated as the PSC candidate, facing however the hostility of Cristina Reyes, a former assemblywoman, who subsequently left the party and contemplated running against Viteri, without further consequences.



Like I previously said, the campaign of Viteri has been terrible, from the publications of videos accused of promoting violence to the announcement of the La Colorada craft beer with the head of Cynthia on the can, in a strange reminiscence of Abdalá Bucaram’s Abdalac milk. A complaint has been filed before the CNE over allegation the beer has been distributed during the passage of the candidate’s motorcade and accusation of illegal promotion of an alcoholic beverage.

Jimmy Jairala (CD+PSE). This is the third attempt of Jairala to be elected the mayor of Guayaquil after two previous bids in 2004 (30.0% of the vote) and 2019 (31.8%). Until his first bid, as the candidate of the PRE, he had a long career as a journalist in television, radio and print. After a short stint as an assemblyman in 2007, he was elected prefect of Guayas in 2009, defeating the Alianza PAIS candidate, Rafael Correa’s own sister, and was reelected in 2014, this time with the support of the Correa government. After his defeat in the 2019 municipal elections, he came back to journalism by hosting a radio program (‘Un Café con JJ’) in which he interviewed many politicians and that in spite of still having his movement and trying to influence (he basically used campaigned for Arauz, sponsored by the CD, in the 2021 elections). Like Yunda, Jairala is suspected of controlling various radio stations through front men.

Jairala has made a relatively low-profile campaign but still came up with a strong proposal: the construction of an electrical elevated train financed with a private-public partnership. According to Jairala, a first line with twenty stations could be completed in two years and a half. The project has been widely criticized for being an even more expansive version of the Aerovía. Jairala is also advocating a more conciliating approach towards informal street vendors who have faced problems under the Viteri administration.

Aquiles Álvarez (RC). A 38-year-old businessman who spent most of his youth in the United States, Álvarez is the manager or the shareholder of twenty companies in oil and real estate sectors. He became a household name in Guayaquil as a leader (president of the soccer commission and later vice-president) of the Barcelona Sporting Club, the most popular soccer club of Guayaquil. So not a very left-wing profile, something which could potentially alienate parts of the RC voting base, especially after Álvarez had publicly criticized Andrés Arauz. The main focus of Álvarez’s platform is the ‘quarter of an hour city’ (access to public services to all inhabitants in a journey inferior to fifteen minutes), a deconcentration of activities from downtown to the peripheral neighborhoods and a development of green spaces, a real issue in the very cemented Guayaquil.

Pedro Pablo Duart (SUMA). A former director for social action and education in the PSC Guayaquil municipality, Duart served during a year (2019-20) as the governor of Guayas in the Moreno administration. In that post, he was criticized for enabling a soccer match attended by 19,000 persons in early March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and justifying it by claiming that ‘the most dangerous virus is fear’. He was oversaw the management of the response to the pandemic in the province, notably the distribution of food and medicines, a nice way to promote his own political career.

The candidacy of ‘PPD’ is supported by Otto Sonnenholzner, a Guayaquil young oligarch who served as vice-president under Moreno (2018-20), rumored to have presidential ambitions. Running as an alternative right-wing candidate to Viteri, PPD has hired Víctor López, a Spanish consultant who previously worked on Bukele’s presidential campaign, and promised the building of a prison in Guayaquil to jail corrupt judges. He also posted on TikTok a video in which he can be seen doing the ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme challenge’: executing a split on the roof of two vans (Jesus this campaign is totally moronic). How much right-wingers the chimbador PPD would have seduced could be determinant to decide the reelection of Viteri.

Jonathan Parra (MOVER). A young lawyer who served as an alternate assemblyman (elected in 2017 for Alianza PAIS) and has angered the RC by posing as the ‘real’ Correísta candidate, trying to exploit the discontent among the RC party bases over the selection of Álvarez. I don’t think such strategy will be very successful and Parra’s attempt to revive the debate about traffic fines appears not having take off.

Antonio Orbe (Avanza). An engineer and former president of the student association of Guayaquil University who is currently serving as the secretary-general of Avanza. Orbe previously was the 2019 Avanza candidate for prefect of Guayas but received only 0.6% of the votes.

Ecuador Montenegro (UP+PK). A physician who has been active in student and medical unionism but has no previous electoral experience.

John Garaycoa (ID). A criminologist who is also the president of a private security company. Has no previous political experience.

Jaime Páez (MDS). A former state employee in entities related to water management and manager in a railway management company based in Houston (?). Has no previous political experience.

Iván Tutillo (Renovation Movement). A computer science researcher who unsuccessfully ran for assemblyman from Guayas in 2021 for Renovation Movement, a provincial movement.

Rocío Serrano (PSP). A former model, actress and TV presenter who was designated as the PSP candidate for mayor of Guayaquil at the last minute, being until then the party’s candidate in Naranjito, a rural canton in Guayas Serrano is hailing for. Serrano has been nominated in Guayaquil to replace the initially selected candidate, a lawyer who had previously served as an ID alternate assemblywoman and who herself replaced another candidate designated before (a TV actress who was ultimately deselected without explanations). An indication of the problems faced by numerous parties to find candidates, even when for an office as much important as mayor of Guayaquil.


Guayas (prefect)

Thirteen candidates are running, the most relevant ones being:

Susana González (PSC-Madera de Guerrero). Former TV journalist and adviser to Jaime Nebot who served as a PSC national assemblywoman in 2009-13. After a term as a municipal counselor in Guayaquil (2014-18), she was elected in 2019 the vice-prefect of Guayas as the running-mate of Carlos Luis Morales, a former soccer goalkeeper previously active in the PRE and CD parties and designated as the PSC candidate for prefecture. Morales died of Covid in June 2020 while investigated for influence peddling and embezzlement in the procurement of medical devices to public hospitals in Guayas and González then ascended to the position of prefect.

González is a vulnerable incumbent, facing the rival candidacy of Nicolás Lapentti, the former longtime PSC prefect. During the TV debate, both candidates traded accusations of having been inefficient and incompetent administrators, not the best publicity for the PSC brand. Additionally, González failed to fulfill one of her key promises, the dredging of the Guayas River, as the Chinese dredger contracted to carry out the job faced delays and will not be in Guayas before mid-February  when it was supposed to be there before election day.

Marcela Aguiñaga (RC). A very close associate of Rafael Correa, Aguiñaga worked as a judicial advisor in the legal company headed by Heinz Moeller (a PSC influential politician who served as president of the Congrees and foreign minister) before joining the Alianza PAIS and becoming an environment minister (2007-12) in the Correa government. An assemblywoman between 2013 and 2021, she served as the second vice-president of the National Assembly during the 2013-17 legislature. An opponent to President Moreno, she followed Correístas in the FCS party and became its national president after its refoundation as the RC.

Nicolás Lapentti (‘La Fuerza que nos Une’: PID+PSP+AMIGO. The 78-year-old candidate is a former professional basketball player and the father of Nicolás and Giovanni Lapentti, two tennis players at an international level. Lapentti was the PSC prefect of Guayas during almost seventeen years (1992-2009) before being elected in 2009 an assemblyman on the PSC national list. Defeated in his reelection bid to a parliamentary seat in 2013, Lapentti then withdrew from politics. He resurfaced almost a decade later to announce his intent to run either for mayor of Guayaquil either for prefect of Guayas, opting for the latter when having secured the support of the PSP, later joined by the PID and AMIGO. Once considered as a close associate of Nebot, Lapentti’s bid has reported having triggered by the PSC’s choice to renominate Viteri and González. His running-mate is María Fernanda Ríos, a model, singer, fashion designer, juror in the Ecuadorian version of Got Talent and telenovela actress with no political experience.

Andrés Guschmer (RETO). A TV journalist and commentator for over twenty years, Guschmer jumped into politics when elected in 2019 a PSC counselor in Guayaquil. He had reportedly been selected to refresh the image of the right-wing party but has declined running for reelection for his seat in Guayaquil council and instead started a largely hopeless candidacy for prefect of Guayas, possibly to advance his political career.

Héctor Vanegas (MOVER). The twin brother of Pachakutik assemblyman Ricardo Vanegas, Héctor Vanegas is pretty much a living and tropical version of Saul Goodman, being the president and main shareholder of a law firm flooding Guayaquil airwaves with cheap and bombastic ads. Héctor’s trademark fedora, bow tie and cane as well as the fact he has his own TV show aren’t helping taking him as a serious lawyer.




This isn’t Vanegas’ first foray into politics as he has already ran for prefect of Guayas in 2009 as a PRIAN candidate, for Guayas assemblyman in 2013 as a PRE candidate and for Guayas assemblyman in 2017 as a FCS candidate before finally being elected a Guayaquil municipal counselor for the CD in 2019. Leaving the CD few months thereafter, Vanegas attempted to join the RC (his membership was rejected by the party leadership due to the uproar caused among rank-and-file members) before being announced as a 2023 candidate of the CD-PSE alliance for prefect of Guayas. Due to misogynist comments Vanegas made while promoting his candidacy, the CD withdrawn its support but the PSE, in spite of pressure from its membership, kept its support for the controversial lawyer. However, when the deadline for registering candidacies had expired, surprise, Vanegas was now a candidate for MOVER.

Predictably, the campaign of Vanegas has turned into a disgraceful freakshow (there is a video where the fedora lawyer can be seen dancing in a jeep with an overweight bearded man wearing a blonde wig and a little black dress that went viral and during the TV debate Vanegas showed his ‘fuera la 6’ – out the 6, the number attributed to the PSC – tattoo). One of the promises made by Vanegas in his platform is the fostering of production of medicinal cannabis.

Francesco Tabacchi (CREO). The president of the Federation of Cattle Breeders of Ecuador, Tabacchi, who has himself no previous political experience, is the brother of Domenica Tabacchi, a former PSC vice-mayor of Guayaquil. His candidacy has been attributed to further internal divisions in the PSC.

Richard Intriago (ID). Intriago is the president of the National Campesino Movement, a coastal agrarian federation he unsuccessfully tried to turn into a political movement to support a presidential bid. Instead, he has managed to get the support of the ID in his bid for prefect. The ‘highlight’ of his campaign has been his bogus hunger strike in front of the CNE provincial delegation to protest the alleged use by Susana González of the financial means of the prefecture to fund her own campaign.

Durán, Guayas (mayor)

In that poorest suburb of Guayaquil and second largest city of the province where access to running water is remaining an unsolved problem, the incumbent PSC mayor, Dalton Narváez, has been sidelined by the right-party due to his incompetence and unpopularity and replaced as a candidate by Rodrigo Aparicio Arce. This one is the cousin of the RC candidate and former mayor (2014-19) Alexandra Arce who has resigned from her parliamentary seat to attempt regaining her job. The rest of the candidacies seems to have been determined by an insane game of musical chairs: Luis Chonillo (RETO-Construye-Avanza+three local movements), initially announced as the ID candidate, was the CD candidate for mayor in 2019; José Solís (CD-ID) was the candidate for mayor of the United Ecuadorian Movement four years ago; Leonidas Cevallos (PSE) ran as a 2019 candidate for mayor for Álvaro Noboa’s party; Pablo Ayala (Pachakutik+a local movement) was elected in 2019 a municipal counselor for the CD.

Milagro, Guayas (mayor)

The daughter of the term-limited PSC mayor, Daniela Asán, is running to succeed her father at the helm of the third most populated canton of Guayas. She is facing José Francisco Cevallos (PID-PK), a former soccer player and minister for sport under Correa, as well as Francisco Andrés Cevallos (CD-CREO-Construye-RETO-Renovación), the own son of José Francisco. Other candidates are including Edison Guaranga (UP), the 2019 FCS candidate for mayor, and Pedro Solines (RC), a former superintendent for banks and insurances.

Simón Bolívar, Guayas (mayor)

In this pretty irrelevant 30,000-inhabitant canton, the RC candidate, María Fernanda ‘Mafer’ Vargas, made national headlines because of her previous activity as an OnlyFans model, attracting a lot of critics, some very misogynistic. The 25-year-old Kathy Sánchez (PSC) is trying to keep the canton under the control of the right-wing party as the incumbent mayor appears term-limited.
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« Reply #14 on: February 05, 2023, 11:39:27 AM »

Manabí

Manabí (prefect)

The incumbent RC prefect Leonardo Orlando, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service (SRI) in the Correa administration, was elected in 2019 with 28.5% of the vote against 25.7% for his closest rival, Jaime Estrada (founder of the Manta Fútbol Club soccer team and a former DP legislator and mayor of Manta in 2009-14) who ran as the candidate of a joint alliance between CREO and his Sí Podemos (lista 72) personalist local movement. Estrada unsuccessfully tried to challenge the results before the CNE, arguing of irregularities. Four years alter, Orlando is running for reelection as part of an alliance between the RC and Sí Podemos, Estrada having endorsed his former rival in exchange of the RC support to his own son’s bid in the election of mayor of Manta.

His strongest challenger is Agustín Casanova (CAMINANTES-Unidad Primero-PSC-SUMA), a former assistant director of Banco Pichincha who, after a stint as a public administrator in Portoviejo (the province’s capital), was elected the mayor of this city in 2014 as the candidate of SUMA. Four years later, he was reelected for his own personal movement, CAMINO (standing for Change, Integrity and Order) which he has turned into a provincial wide movement, CAMINANTES (standing for Integral Change with Action, Talent and Hope) in order to capture the prefecture. He has received the endorsement of his former party, of the PSC and of Unidad Primero, the local party of former prefect (2005-19) Mariano Zambrano.

Also running is Jaime Zambrano Cedeño (CREO-Construye), a building contractor and the predecessor (1996-2009) and successor (2014-19) of Estrada as mayor of Manta. Zambrano had unsuccessfully tried to get elected an assemblyman on 2013 with the support of CREO.

Among other candidates are Isaac Avellán Cedeño (UP), a former local leader of the FESE and the FEUE student organizations, already ran for prefect in 2014 for the MPD, the forerunner of the UP; Roddy Zambrano (MDS), a former international soccer referee now doing business in catering sector; Gonzalo Rodríguez (CD-RETO), a businessman in shrimp farming sector and the Fuerza Ecuador 2019 candidate for prefect (receiving 2.6% of the vote); Jorge Arteaga Santana (MOVER), a businessman in electricity sector and the former director of the provincial branch of the PSP and Jorge Loor Zambrano (ID), who ran in 2003 as a Socialist candidate for a seat in Portoviejo municipal council.



Portoviejo (mayor)

Byron Joza (CAMINANTES-Unidad Primero-PSC-SUMA), an organizer in the city’s barrios currently employed as an assistant director for the cantonal public services, is running as the anointed successor of Casanova with the support of the same four-party alliance. He is notably opposed by the Correísta candidate, Rafael Saltos (RC-Sí Podemos), a former director of the provincial judicature council, Clemente Vásquez (CREO-Construye), a former prefect (1992-96) and deputy (1998-2007) for Manabí who unsuccessfully ran for prefect four years ago as the candidate of an alliance between the PSC, CAMINO and Unidad Primero,  Scheznarda Fernández Doumet (CD-RETO), a former municipal counselor (2000-09) and PSC assemblywoman (2009-13) and Mayra Perero (ID), an incumbent municipal counselor elected in 2019 on the PSC-CAMINO-Unidad Primero. Also a municipal counselor since 2014 for Avanza, Javier Pincay has been nominated by this party to run for mayor and survived an assassination attempt by motorcycle hit-men on last December.



Manta (mayor)

Elected in 2019, the incumbent mayor, Agustín Intriago (Mejor Ciudad, lista 107), has faced accusations in the medias and by Fernando Villavicencio of mainting business ties with people involved in drug trafficking and being connected to drug money laundering activities. His main challenger appears to be Jaime Estrada Medranda (RC-Sí Podemos), the son of former mayor Jaime Estrada, and a sports official without previous political experience who has chaired the Manta Fútbol Club and served as a vice president of the Ecuadorian Soccer Federation.



Other mayoral races

In Chone, the third largest city of the province, the PSC incumbent mayor Leonardo Rodríguez is running for reelection against six opponents among whom are Marlon Humberto Vera (RC-Podemos Sí) who attempted with mixed results to exploit the popularity of his brother, a quite famous martial artist, the former mayor (2009-14) Italo Colomarco then elected as an Unidad Primero candidate but now supported by an unlikely CD-UP-RETO alliance, as well as Fausto Cobo Delgado (CREO-Construye), the son of the director of the prisons administration and former high official in the PSP who is accused of benefiting from illegal public financing thanks to his daddy.

In Puerto López, a small fishing port believed to have turn into a hub for drug trafficking, the RC candidate, Omar Menéndez, has been assassinated this night by hit-men during a public event (a 16-year-old teenager was also killed), the second candidate for mayor to be murdered after Julio César Farachio, the UP-PSP-MOVER candidate for mayor of Salinas, in the neighboring province of Santa Elena. Farachio was killed by motorcycle hit-men during a political meeting last month. The election in Puerto López would not be repeated: the name of Menéndez is remaining on the ballot and in case it receives the most votes, it would be up to the RC to designate the elected mayor. According to the police, Menéndez has been in the last week the target of acts of intimidation.

Five other violent incidents related to the election have been reported for the sole province of Manabí:

- the murder in August of a RC candidate for a seat in Manta municipal council
- a gun attack in last September against the home of the mayor of Flavio Alfaro, elected in 2019 for the PSC but running for reelection for the RC
- the aforementioned assassination attempt against Javier Pincay in Portoviejo
- a gun attack in last December against the mayor of Junín, elected in 2019 for CREO but running for reelection as a RC candidate
- a gun attack a week later against the PSC mayor of El Carmen, running for reelection during which the mayor’s driver was killed.
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Sir John Johns
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« Reply #15 on: February 05, 2023, 04:26:58 PM »

Azuay

Azuay (prefect)

Back in 2019, the election for prefect of Azuay was won by the Pachakutik candidate, Yaku Pérez, with 29.0% of the vote against 19.4% for the ID-UP candidate, 18.1% for the CREO candidate (also endorsed by Igualdad, the party of local caudillo Marcelo Cabrera), 12.2% for the Correísta candidate and 11.4% for the Juntos Podemos candidate aiming at succeeding to Paúl Carrasco, the prefect since 2005. Pérez resigned in 2020 to prepare his presidential bid and was replaced by Cecilia Méndez Mora.

Pachakutik will certainly not keep the prefecture as the selection process to nominate a candidate for this year’s election has led to a rupture inside the local branch of the movement, already weakened by the departure of Yaku Pérez: in the middle of allegations of irregularities, the indigenous party local leadership anointed as candidate, in alliance with MDS (‘Hagámoslo con Shungo’), Dora Ordóñez, a former Cuenca municipal counselor elected in 2014 on the list of Paúl Carrasco’s local Participa movement and an anti-corruption secretary (2019-20) in the government of Lenín Moreno. Such choice, unsuccessfully challenged before courts by unhappy Pachakutik local leaders, was also widely rejected by the movement’s bases which instead endorsed Sebastián Cevallos the candidate of the UP. In addition to these internal feuds, Ordóñez’s electoral result may also been hurt by the performance of the candidate in the televised debate, when she had to give up after fifteen minutes, apparently suffering from discomfort.

The favorite of the election appears to be instead Marcelo Cabrera (Azuay Primero: Igualdad+Participa), a former prefect (1996-2004) and mayor of Cuenca (2005-09, 2014-19) who had been a member of the DP and the ID before founding his own provincial movement, Igualdad. Cabrera unsuccessfully tried to be elected a mayor of Cuenca in 2019 (when also supported by CREO) before being elected an assemblyman in 2021. He immediately resigned his seat to enter the Lasso government and became a transportation minister (2021-22). While Cabrera has received the endorsement of Participa (of which Carrasco seems to have recently lost control over), he isn’t supported by CREO. The ruling party has indeed decided to endorse Diego Monsalve, a former colleague of Cabrera in the government when s a vice-minister of economic inclusion. Monsalve is also supported by the CD, the PID and RETO, the national movement of Carrasco as Igualdad, the party he founded at local level, has as we have seen endorsed Cabrera, the arch-nemesis of Carrasco.

The RC candidate is Juan Cristóbal Lloret, who, after having served as a governor of Azuay in the Correa government got elected a provincial assemblyman in 2021 but resigned his seat to attempt capturing the prefecture. An Avanza-PSP alliance is supporting Magali Quezada, a former mayor of Nabón (elected for Pachakutik) who has served as a vice-prefect of Azuay between 2020 and 2022, while the Azuay Libre (SUMA+Construye) alliance is running Ruth Caldas, a former Alianza PAIS counselor and vice-mayor of Cuenca between 2009 and 2019.



Cuenca (mayor)

Also, another complicated game of musical chairs here. The incumbent mayor Pedro Palacios has been elected in 2019 with 28.1% (a scenario not a single poll predicted) on a left-leaning platform and with the support of both the MDS and the United Ecuadorian Movement, defeating the favorite, Jefferson Pérez (Renace), a former Olympic athlete, as well as the two rival political dinosaurs, Marcelo Cabrera and Paúl Carrasco. Palacios, who seems to have disappointed his left-wing voters, is now running for reelection under the banner of his own personal movement, Nueva Generación (lista 100).

He is again facing Carrasco (RETO/CD/PID/CREO) while, similarly to the prefect election, Pachakutik has divided over the nomination as the selected candidate, Adrián Castro (also supported by MDS), is a former director for the National Agency for Transit in the Lasso administration and a former member of Cabrera’s Igualdad.

As a consequence, a faction of Pachakutik has called electors to vote for Cristian Zamora, the candidate of an ID-MOVER alliance, who has been a municipal counselor for Participa (when led by Carrasco), a movement for which he had been elected in 2014 and reelected in 2019; in the absence of the UP candidate (Pachakutik’s favorite partner), who has been disqualified for being an Italian national, the Pachakutik dissident faction endorsed Zamora as a second choice.

The RC candidate is Roque Ordóñez, a former public official now famous for his video with Correa, while the tentative SUMA-Construye alliance has collapsed after the candidate it had nominated, Jaime Moreno, a former councilor for Igualdad, decided to ditch them to instead run as the candidate for an alliance between Participa and... his old party, Igualdad. Omar Álvarez (Renace-PSE) is the only candidate with Ordóñez to have remain loyal to its political organization, having been elected a municipal counselor in 2019, already for Renace. Also running is Verónica Abad, the candidate for AMIGO.


Los Ríos

Los Ríos (prefect)

An election that should turn into a three-way race between the representatives of the Terán, Mendoza and Alvarado dynasties.

The incumbent PSC Johnny Terán (in office since 2019 after having served as the mayor of Babahoyo, the province’s capital, in 2000-09 and 2014-18), who has managed to get his own son (Johnny Terán Barragán) being elected in 2021 an assemblyman, is running for reelection, again for the PSC.

He is facing Eduardo Mendoza, the former mayor of Buena Fe (2014-22, elected firstly for Avanza and reelected for an alliance between CREO and Fuerza Ecuador), who is supported by a mega-alliance of nine (!) parties (CD, PSP, PID, PSE, MDS, CREO, SUMA, Construye and the local Crecer). Mendoza is the brother of the late Patricio Mendoza, a former mayor of Buena Fe like Eduardo as well as assemblyman for the PRE and later CREO, who ran for prefect four years ago as the candidate of a CREO-Fuerza Ecuador alliance only to be defeated by Terán (26.3% vs. 24.3%); Patricio was murdered in 2020 when running for a seat in the National Assembly as a candidate for Avanza; he was then replaced by Eduardo Mendoza Hurtado, his 25-year-old nephew and the son of Eduardo, who got elected.

The Correísta candidate is, like in 2019, Humberto Alvarado (this year also supported by RETO), the son of the late Humberto Alvarado Prado, the owner of a radio station who was successively a PSC counselor in Quevedo and an Alianza PAIS assemblyman; Humberto Jr. also started his career in the PSC before joining Correísmo for which he was elected an assemblyman in 2021. Humberto is also the brother of Fernando and Vinicio Alvarado, two very close collaborators of Correa and the owners of an advertising company.

The so-called Machete y Garabato (ID-Pachakutik) is running the candidacy of Leandro Ullón, a former mayor of Mocache, elected in 2013 as a PSP candidate and reelected in 2014 with the additional support of CREO and SUMA.

For its part, Avanza is running Nella Vanessa León, a lawyer without political experience and not much hopes of success.



Babahoyo (mayor)

In 2019, the PSC barely kept the municipality after the popular incumbent Johnny Terán opted to run for provincial prefect, as it then-candidate, Carlos Germán Gaibor, defeated in a close election (28.3% against 26.9%) Gustavo Barquet, aka ‘Toro Loco’, the candidate fielded by an alliance between Alianza PAIS, CD and the local MRB (Movimiento Renovador Babahoyense). Barquet was designated as the alliance’s candidate after the disqualification of the initial candidate, César Troya, a lawyer.

With Germán not running for reelection, the PSC has appointed as its candidate the aforementioned César Troya (in alliance with his own MRB movement) who is facing no less than Gustavo Barquet, now the candidate of an alliance between the RC and RETO. The nomination of Barquet provoked internal dissent in the local RC wing with a faction reportedly deciding to instead supporting the candidacy of Pablo Arias, elected in 2019 as counselor for the CREO-Fuerza Ecuador alliance, and running as the candidate for mayor with the endorsement of the same mega-alliance supporting Mendoza at provincial level minus Crecer (which is running its own candidate here). For his part, Patricio Aguirre, while a former PSC counselor, is running for mayor for the ‘Pacha es la Pinta’ alliance made up by the PSP and Pachakutik.



Quevedo (mayor)

In this canton won by the PSC in 2019, the incumbent mayor has declined running for reelection convincing the PSC to nominate Alfons Teixidor, a Catalan businessman living in Ecuador since 2009 who was already a candidate in 2019, but for the United Ecuadorian Movement; tellingly, Teixidor has announced his candidacy when not having a party to support him.

The RC is running Alexis Matute, who unsuccessfully tried to be elected an assemblyman for the UNES in 2021 while the controversial former right-wing assemblyman Galo Lara (sentenced in 2013 to ten years of prison for his alleged involvement in the massacre of four persons, a charge Lara has always claimed to have been fabricated by the Correa government, and freed in 2018 by President Moreno), is the candidate of an alliance between his party, the PSP, the ID and Pachakutik. Lara is notably advocating the passage of legislation provisioning that 90% of workers employed should be born in Quevedo canton to ensure the employment of the native population.
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« Reply #16 on: February 05, 2023, 05:22:05 PM »

Polls have closed.

First exit poll in the race for mayor of Guayaquil (Market):
Cynthia Viteri (PSC) 40.04%
Aquiles Álvarez (RC) 30.17%
Jimmy Jairala (CD-PSE) 10.41%
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« Reply #17 on: February 05, 2023, 05:26:55 PM »

Quito mayor (Market exit poll):

Jorge Yunda (PK-PID-MOVER) 22.68%
Pabel Muñoz (RC) 21.99%
Pedro Freile (PSE-SUMA) 18.49%
Andrés Páez (PSP-MDS) 12.88%

All questions would have been approved in the referendum.
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« Reply #18 on: February 05, 2023, 05:34:17 PM »

Azuay (Market exit poll):
Marcelo Cabrera (Igualdad-Participa) 21.89%
Sebastián Cevallos (UP) 16.60%
Juan Cristóbal Lloret (RC) 14.07%

Cuenca (Market exil poll):
Cristian Zamora (ID-MOVER) 17.93%
Paúl Carrasco (CD-RETO-PID-CREO) 17.81%
Adrián Castro (MDS-PK) 17.77%
Pedro Palacios (MNG) 17.73%

Lot of fun here.
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« Reply #19 on: February 05, 2023, 10:32:48 PM »

Other exit polls by Market (source El Universo):
Guayas prefecture:
Susana González (PSC-MG) 32.02%
Marcela Aguiñaga (RC) 25.67%
Nicolás Lappenti Carrión (PID-PSP-AMIGO) 11.85%
Andrés Guschmer (RETO) 7.05%

Pichincha prefecture:
Paola Pabón (RC) 32.01%
Guillermo Churuchumbi (PK-PID-MOVER) 19.88%
Eduardo del Pozo (CREO-RETO-MC25-AHORA) 16.19%
Andrés Felipe Castillo (PSC) 5.13%

Official results site, currently with preliminary data
https://elecciones2023.cne.gob.ec/
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« Reply #20 on: February 06, 2023, 12:13:14 AM »

Current preliminary results for the top races:
Guayaquil mayorship (58% counted):
Aquiles Álvarez (RC) 39.5%
Cynthia Viteri (PSC) 30.4%
Pedro Pablo Duart (SUMA) 14.6%
Jimmy Jairala (CD-PSE) 10.3%

Guayas prefecture (36% counted):
Marcela Aguiñaga (RC) 34.8%
Susana González (PSC-MG) 25.9%
Andrés Guschmer (RETO) 11.7%
Francesco Tabacchi (CREO) 6.1%
Nicolás Lapentti (PID-PSP-AMIGO) 6.1%
Héctor Vanegas (MOVER) 6.0%

Both Correísta candidates declared themselves as virtual winners in what would be a historic win after decades of PSC administrations, meanwhile in the PSC they prefer to wait.

Quito mayorship (65% counted):
Pabel Muñoz (RC) 25.1%
Jorge Yunda (PK-PID-MOVER) 22.4%
Pedro José Freile (PSE-SUMA) 22.1%
Andrés Páez (PSP-MDS) 12.5%
Pablo Ponce (ID) 4.6%

Correísta candidate Muñoz virtual winner, Yunda already conceeded and congratulate Muñoz on their socials.

Pichincha prefecture (55% counted)
Paola Pabón (RC) 27.9%
Guillermo Churuchumbi (PK-PID-MOVER) 25.5%
Eduardo del Pozo (CREO-RETO-MC25-AHORA) 15.6%
Elsa Guerra (PSE-SUMA) 8.8%
Roberto Altamirano (ID) 5.1%

Cuenca mayorship (63% counted):
Cristian Zamora (ID-MOVER) 18.8%
Pedro Palacios (MNG) 17.2%
Adrián Castro Piedra (PK-MDS) 17.0%
Paúl Carrasco (RETO-CD-PID-CREO) 16.9%
Roque Ordoñez (RC) 13.9%

Azuay prefecture (54% counted)
Juan Cristóbal Lloret (RC) 20.1%
Marcelo Cabrera (Azuay Primero) 19.5%
Sebastián Cevallos (UP) 13.3%
Dora Ordóñez (PK-MDS) 10.7%

In the referendums (at early count), seems the No is leading in all questions, the most rejected the 5 (Control authorities) and 6 (the related to the CPCCS) with 58.6% No/41.4% Yes and the most closed are the 1 (related to extraditions) and the 3 (change to the formula to distribute mandates in the National Assembly) with 52.6% No/47.4% Yes
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« Reply #21 on: February 06, 2023, 04:48:31 AM »

Well, turns out the ‘exit polls’ of Market were completely off. Another crash in the ill-reputed Ecuadorian polling industry. The polls published by Cedatos on the referendum aren’t actually exit polls but actually a poll made in the latest days before the election. Glad, the CNE is supposed the regulate polls to prevent such kind of deceit to happen.

The most important fact of the local elections may be the (totally deserved) bloodbath for the PSC which is not only losing Guayaquil (after 31 years of rule), but also the cantons of Durán and Milagro (so the three most-populated cities in Guayas) and the provincial prefecture. Durán has been won by Luis Chonillo (RETO-Construye-Avanza-Movimiento Ciudadano-Durán Puede Mas-Renovación) with 36.2% against 24.5% for the RC candidate and former mayor Alexandra Arce and 21.0% for the PSC candidate, Rodrigo Aparicio while in Milagro it is the RC candidate, Pedro Solines, who was won with 31.5% with the incumbent PSC mayor placing only third with 20.1%. In Guayaquil and Guayas, the candidacies of Duart (14.4%) and Guschmer (11.5%) and Lapentti (6.3%) have played their role of chimbadores.

Such results possibly spell the end of the PSC (it still reelected its incumbent in Los Ríos and Esmeraldas), which is paying its incomprehensible strategy at national level (opposition to Lasso), the accumulation of scandals in its local administrations, the utterly deranged campaign of Viteri and more generally voters' fatigue with a party that hasn’t be able to renew itself.

President Lasso was supposed to make a TV announcement concerning the election results but this has been canceled. Not only the predicted landslide of the ‘yes’ may not have happened but the ‘no’ may now prevailed, which would be a disaster for the government. The ‘no’ leading in question 1 with 56.6% when 19.6% of the votes have been counted is not a very good sign for Lasso.
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« Reply #22 on: February 06, 2023, 05:31:16 AM »

What a night for Correa and Revolución Ciudadana! Incredibly surprising!
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Sadader
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« Reply #23 on: February 06, 2023, 08:30:10 AM »
« Edited: February 06, 2023, 08:39:42 AM by Sadader »

Wow.

Lasso was a dead man walking anyway so honestly I don't see how much this matters outside of the pointing to an RC victory at the next pres election. What does this even mean?

Judging by the move in Ecuadorian financial markets you'd think that there'd been an armed coup lol
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kaoras
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« Reply #24 on: February 06, 2023, 08:53:40 AM »

Wow.

Lasso was a dead man walking anyway so honestly I don't see how much this matters outside of the pointing to an RC victory at the next pres election. What does this even mean?

Judging by the move in Ecuadorian financial markets you'd think that there'd been an armed coup lol

At the end of the day RC is just boring, inconsistently progressive, desarrollista technocracy (and about as corrupt as the rest of the political spectrum). Markets really should chill.
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