Daniel Noboa has been re-elected as president of Ecuador with a margin that has stunned most observers. Simply weeks earlier than the April 13 runoff, polls had him neck and neck together with his left-wing rival, Luisa González. In the long run, Noboa secured about 56% of the vote in opposition to González’s 44%, a distinction of greater than 1 million votes.
The victory offers Noboa, a 37-year-old businessman and political outsider, a full four-year mandate. Noboa gained a shortened presidential time period in November 2023 in a snap election known as when his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved congress in an try to flee impeachment.
It additionally marks the third consecutive presidential defeat for the motion led by former president, Rafael Correa, whose affect stays polarising in Ecuadorian politics.
González is, on the time of writing, refusing to concede, claiming “grotesque” electoral fraud. “I refuse to believe that the people prefer lies over the truth”, she has mentioned. However she has offered no proof to help the allegation.
Worldwide observers, together with the EU and the Organisation of American States, have confirmed the elections had been free and truthful. Within the absence of proof, the fraud claims seem like extra political theatre than an actual problem to the integrity of the vote.
Luisa González has not accepted the outcomes, calling Noboa’s victory the ‘most grotesque fraud’ in Ecuador’s historical past.
Jose Jacome / EPA
Political scion to dominant incumbent
Noboa’s marketing campaign leaned closely on safety – a theme that has come to dominate Ecuadorian public life because the nation grapples with document ranges of violence. Since assuming the presidency in 2023, Noboa has ruled beneath a everlasting state of emergency.
He declared an “internal armed conflict” in early 2024, deployed the navy in prisons and on the streets, and launched a wide-ranging safety plan known as Plan Fénix. This plan contains constructing a brand new maximum-security jail within the coastal province of Santa Elena modelled on El Salvador’s much-criticised strategy to curbing violence.
Initially, these measures gained Noboa widespread help. However the image quickly darkened. January 2025 was Ecuador’s most violent month on document, with 781 homicides. Prison teams stay entrenched within the nation’s port cities and prisons. And human rights organisations have raised critical considerations about arbitrary arrests, the extreme use of pressure, and the militarisation of civilian life.
Regardless of these setbacks, Noboa’s message of energy and order clearly resonated with voters. Ecuadorians, exhausted by spiralling violence, seem prepared to just accept extra authoritarian governance in change for security. This can be a pattern seen throughout the area, from President Nayib Bukele’s 2024 re-election in El Salvador to rising approval for militarised policing in Brazil, Honduras and Mexico.
Ecuadorian safety forces detain two males throughout an operation in Guayaquil, a port metropolis in western Ecuador.
Mauricio Torres / EPA
The challenges Noboa now faces are daunting. Probably the most urgent is Ecuador’s descent into organised crime and narco-violence. Located between Colombia and Peru, the nation has turn into a significant transit hub for cocaine certain for the US and Europe. Highly effective worldwide cartels have partnered with native gangs, and the state has misplaced management over massive swaths of territory.
In response, Noboa has not solely empowered the armed forces however has additionally sought worldwide help. In 2024, he met with Erik Prince, the founding father of Blackwater, a controversial US personal navy contractor. This raised considerations concerning the outsourcing of Ecuador’s safety and its implications for human rights. He has additionally floated the concept of internet hosting international troops in Ecuador, a proposal that might require a constitutional modification.
However militarised options alone didn’t convey an finish to violence throughout Noboa’s first time period, nor are they seemingly to achieve his second.
Ecuador’s safety disaster isn’t just a matter of policing – it’s a disaster of state capability. The judiciary is riddled with corruption, prisons have turn into centres of prison coordination, and cops are sometimes outgunned and underpaid. With out reforming these establishments, Noboa’s conflict on crime dangers changing into a conflict with out finish.
On the similar time, Ecuador’s financial system is faltering. In 2024, the nation fell into recession, with GDP contracting and inflation rising. Ecuador is reliant on hydropower for its electrical energy era, and a historic drought that yr precipitated blackouts lasting as much as 14 hours a day. This revealed years of under-investment in infrastructure.
In response, Noboa raised VAT, minimize gas subsidies, and secured a US$4 billion (roughly £3 billion) mortgage from the Worldwide Financial Fund. These unpopular measures provoked grumbling however not mass protests, a reality some analysts attribute to exhaustion moderately than approval.
Inequality stays excessive, particularly for younger individuals and people dwelling in rural and coastal areas. Unemployment and underemployment have an effect on practically half of the working-age inhabitants, and round one-third of Ecuadorians dwell in poverty. Noboa has introduced new money transfers and youth employment programmes, however these are palliative, not structural.
To make issues worse, Noboa governs with restricted help within the Nationwide Meeting. His social gathering, Acción Democrática Nacional, holds 66 of the chamber’s 151 seats – one lower than González’s Citizen Revolution.
The Indigenous Pachakutik social gathering controls an important bloc of 9 seats, however is itself internally divided. Passing laws would require constructing coalitions and compromising. These are expertise that Noboa has but to exhibit at scale.
Noboa’s credibility has additionally been challenged. His household’s banana export firm, Noboa Buying and selling, has been linked to a number of drug seizures in Europe. Whereas there isn’t a proof implicating Noboa immediately, the revelations elevate uncomfortable questions concerning the president’s anti-drug narrative and potential conflicts of curiosity.
The chief of the Pachakutik social gathering, Leonidas Iza.
Jose Jacome / EPA
In the direction of democratic reform
Noboa’s victory offers him a possibility, however not a clean cheque. His success will now rely upon whether or not he can pivot from ruling by decree to governing by consensus. The general public expects outcomes: much less violence, extra jobs and higher political stability.
To satisfy these expectations, he might want to restore the rule of regulation, shield human rights and construct inclusive establishments able to resisting prison seize. This implies professionalising the police, strengthening the judiciary and tackling the deep inequalities that gas violence and despair.
It additionally means stepping again from theatrical gestures, resembling alliances with international mercenaries, and specializing in the sluggish, typically irritating work of state-building.
Within the coming months, Noboa will face a easy however profound take a look at: can he translate his electoral mandate into actual, lasting progress for a rustic on the sting? Ecuador’s future might rely upon the reply.
