On Sunday, voters in Ecuador elected a candidate running for president on a conservative platform for the first time in nearly 15 years. With 99 percent of votes counted, Guillermo Lasso, a former banker and finance minister who advocates shrinking the state and cutting taxes, led his nearest rival, socialist Andrés Arauz, by almost 5 points in the country’s runoff election. Both Arauz and former President Rafael Correa congratulated Lasso on his victory Sunday night, as Lasso, a longtime Correa opponent, pledged pro-business reforms and continued respect for independent institutions and the free press.
More than just a competition between two candidates, the polarizing election became a referendum on Ecuador’s recent past. Arauz ran as the handpicked successor of the populist former leader Correa and promised to return Ecuador to the era of Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution”: a period from 2007 to 2017 marked by high growth and the emergence of a new middle class, but also by repression and censorship of Correa’s civil society critics.
