Next month, Ecuadorian voters will choose between incumbent conservative President Daniel Noboa and progressive challenger Luisa González to be their next president. This will be the second presidential election of 2025, following the February general election in which no candidate secured the 50 percent needed to win outright(Noboa and González both earned about 44 percent of the vote).
Noboa, Ecuador's youngest president and heir to a banana empire, took office in 2023 to complete the term of former President Guillermo Lasso, who dissolved the National Assembly that year—for the first time in Ecuador's history—to avoid an impeachment vote for his alleged role in a corruption scandal involving oil and gas contracts.
Noboa inherited a tumultuous situation—from 2018 to 2022, Ecuador's murder rate quadrupled. Just two months into office, he declared a 60-day state of emergency in seven of the country's 24 provinces. The order designated 22 criminal gangs as terrorist groups, allowed the military to patrol streets, and authorized security forces to "enter homes and intercept correspondence in the targeted provinces without prior authorization," reported Reuters. In January, Noboa issued a second 60-day crime emergency.
