A protege of Ecuador’s former leftist president Rafael Correa will face the son of one of the country’s richest men in a runoff presidential vote in October, after first-round voting on Sunday failed to produce an outright winner.
With more than three-quarters of ballots counted, Luisa González, who has promised to revive Correa’s social programmes, was tallying just over 33% support, while Daniel Noboa, the son of the prominent banana businessman and former presidential candidate Álavaro Noboa, was on 24%.
Under Ecuador’s electoral rules, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, or 40% with a 10-point lead, a runoff election will be held.
In an election overshadowed by political violence, crusading anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was shot dead as he left a campaign rally this month, was polling in third place with more than 16%.
Villavicencio has been replaced by his close friend and fellow investigative journalist Christian Zurita, but appeared on the ballot papers because they had been printed before his murder on 9 August. Six suspects, all Colombians who police say belong to criminal gangs, are being held in connection to the murder of the former journalist and lawmaker. Another suspect died of injuries sustained in a shootout.
Luisa González, a virtual unknown before the election, is seen as the natural successor to Correa, the leftist, populist president who governed the country from 2007 to 2017. As the candidate for the Revolución Ciudadana party, she had said Correa would be her adviser if she was elected. Correa lives in exile in Belgium and was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption in 2020 in absentia.
Whoever wins the second round will only govern for less than a year and a half, completing the unfinished term of outgoing president Guillermo Lasso who called the snap election in May to stave off impeachment by a hostile parliament.
Amid a backdrop of rising crime, violence and economic turmoil, official turnout figures show 82% of voters headed to the polls on Sunday, according to the president of the national electoral council, Diana Atamaint, who also described the election as “peaceful and safe” with no reports of violent incidents at polling booths. There were 100,000 soldiers deployed across the country to protect the electoral process, according to the interior ministry.
However, Atamaint, the country’s top electoral authority, reported that cyber-attacks had targeted the electronic voting system used by Ecuadoreans living abroad. She said the attacks had been traced to Russia, Ukraine, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, but that the incidents did not disrupt the vote count.
Earlier on Sunday, candidates voted amid a powerful display of security. Flanked by dozens of police and army special forces, Villavicencio’s replacement, Christian Zurita, cast his ballot at a polling station at a school in northern Quito, wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet.
Zurita became the new Construye 25 (or Build 25) party candidate just a week before the vote, after the death of Villavicencio. A fellow investigative journalist, he too has received death threats, some attributed to drug cartels linked to prison massacres and a homicide rate that has risen fivefold in as many years.
“These are difficult and dark moments for the country but we are up to it,” Zurita told journalists.
“We must expose all the possible threats against us. Remember that’s how they killed Fernando.”
The murder of Villavicencio, the third politician to be assassinated this year, appeared to be foremost in voters’ minds at a polling station in Quito, metres from where the killing took place.
“Here, what we need is a leader who first of all guarantees that all citizens can move freely,” Jose Luis Hernandez, 37, said.
“In the building next door, they killed Fernando Villavicencio, so these are situations that we as Ecuadoreans – in a country that used to be one of peace and tranquility – did not see coming.”
Voting in the capital, Lucio Gutiérrez, a former president and a parliamentary candidate, said Ecuador needed international help to combat Mexican and Balkan drug cartels operating in the country.
“Ecuador is bleeding to death, Ecuador is falling apart, and if there is no unity between the executive and the legislature, the state could collapse, it could become a failed state.”
At the same polling station, the former interior minister Patricio Carrillo denied accusations that the country was becoming a “narcostate” but said organised crime and illegal economies had infiltrated the state.
“We have to fight corruption and break with this agenda of impunity, that is fundamental,” he said.
Also on Sunday’s ballot were two environmental referendums – both expected to pass – that could block mining in the Chocó Andino forest near Quito and the development of an oil block in Yasuní ITT, a biodiverse stretch of national park in the Amazon.
