After a long wait, the National Electoral Council of Ecuador finally announced this Sunday that the candidate Guillermo Lasso will be the one who will contest the presidency of the country with Andres Arauz in the second round of the elections on April 11. Arauz, from the Union pour la Esperanza (UNES) party, had already secured its place in the second round after obtaining 3,033,753 votes (32.72%) in the first round, held on February 7.Lasso, candidate of the Political Movement Creating Opportunities (CREO) and the Social Christian Party (PSC), finally obtained 1,830,045 votes (19.74%), which placed him with a slight majority over the candidate Yaku Perez, with whom he disputed for almost two weeks the passage to the second round in tight scrutiny.
Perez, from the Plurinational Unity Movement, Pachakutik, was left with 1,797,455 votes (19.39%) and has denounced irregularities in the count, so he does not acknowledge his defeat. On Sunday he assured that the process was full of anomalies and that there it still smells bad,” about the data published by the National Electoral Council that left him out of the presidential race. His followers, many members of the indigenous movement, have joined the protest march to Quito that, led by the candidate, has toured different parts of the country under slogans such as “fraud no, transparency yes. Perez demands from the CNE a 100% recount of votes in the Guayas province and 50% in another 16 of the 24 provinces of the country.
“The march to Quito is for the complaint against those who made us fraud and it is to demand transparency said this Sunday. The march is expected to arrive in Quito this Tuesday. The proclamation of results was approved early Sunday with four votes in favor of the CNE councilors Diana Atamaint, Enrique Pita, José Cabrera, and Luis Vedesoto. The fifth councilor, Esthela Acero, was absent during the National Public Audience of Scrutinies where the proclamation was carried out.
Challenges, According to the candidates can still file different remedies, such as challenges or appeals. The start of the campaign for the second round will start on March 16, and as reported by Diana Atamaint, president of the CNE, once the body notifies the candidates of the results, the challenge stage will open for political organizations.
we tell you who are the two candidates who will face each other again in an election marked by deep political polarization in a country hard hit by the covid-19 pandemic, social unrest, and one of the biggest economic crises in its history . At just 36 years old, Andrés David Arauz Galarza could become the youngest president in the history of Ecuador if he wins the second round. Considered the dolphin of former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), Arauz is the candidate of the Union for Hope (UNIES) movement. The economist, who speaks English, French and Russian, is a graduate of the University of Michigan, United States, and a master’s degree in Development Economics from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Flacso.
He belongs to the Citizen Revolution movement, founded by Rafael Correa, who was originally going to run in the elections as vice president of Arauz. However, the sentence to eight years in prison and political disqualification for the former president, finally made the vice-presidential candidate Carlos Rabascall, under an electoral formula that they call the “binomial for hope.”When presenting his candidacy, he published a message on Twitter that said: “You are greeted by the perfect stranger’ who knows and loves Ecuador,” referring, in an ironic tone, to those who qualified him that way on social networks.
During his campaign, he has promised to deliver a bond of US $ 1,000 to one million families in the first week of government and has said that it is not in his plans to maintain the agreement signed between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the current president, Lenín Moreno, to rebuild the country’s economy. Welcome to the IMF’s support for our own economic program, but submitting to the conditions negotiated by Moreno, we are not going to do it.”Arauz was born on February 6, 1985, in Quito, he is married to Mariana Véliz, with whom he has a son. Despite his youth, he has held various positions in the public sector: at the age of 26 he was director of the Central Bank of Ecuador and at the age of 30 he became Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent, a position he held between 2015 and 2017.
That year he moved to Mexico to begin a doctorate in Financial Economics and at that time founded the Observatory of the Dollarization study center. The candidate, a staunch Latin Americanist, has forged ties with other leftist presidents in the region such as Alberto Fernández, in Argentina, and Luis Arce, in Bolivia. He participates in the Executive Council of the Progressive International, founded in 2020, and of which the US Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, the former Greek Minister of Finance, Yannis Varoufakis, and the Spanish Vice President, Pablo Iglesias are members. Patriot. Democrat. Progressive. Candidate for the Presidency of Ecuador. I never refuse a Jipijapa ceviche he says on his Twitter profile.
Guillermo Lasso, the banker, and businessman who presents himself for the third time conservative candidate of the Political Movement Creating Opportunities (CREO) and the Christian Social Party, representative of the traditional right, Guillermo Lasso Mendoza, the youngest of 11 brothers, is a well-known Ecuadorian banker and businessman who participates in different financial conglomerates. Born in Guayaquil on November 16, 1955, the candidate usually refers to a humble family origin that led him to start working at the age of 15 at the Stock Market in his city. From then on, he developed his career in the banking sector until, at the beginning of the 90s, he came to lead the Association of Private Banks of Ecuador. In August 1999 he was appointed Minister of the Economy, but due to differences he had with then-President Jamil Mahuad on how to manage the country’s economy, he resigned a month later.
Under the slogan entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future, Lasso has said in the campaign that he will respect the agreement with the IMF, except in one point. We are not going to ignore the agreement with the International Monetary Fund. What we are not going to do is raise the VAT, he said, referring to a controversial measure that seeks to increase tax collection in a country with high levels of deficits and debt. public. In his government plan, the candidate proposes to create new jobs, raise the minimum salary to the US $ 500 a month, end the hunger of more than one million Ecuadorians, attract foreign investment and fight corruption.
Close to the ideas of Opus Dei, Lasso surprised the public when during the electoral campaign he proposed that the Quito sculpture of the popular Virgen del Panecillo rotate so that it does not turn its back on the citizens of the south. He has always been a staunch opponent of any proposed law on the decriminalization of abortion, even in cases of rape. Known popularly as the eternal candidate three-time presidential candidate, after losing to Rafael Correa in 2013, and against Lenin Moreno in 2017. Back then, Lasso initially refused to accept the results on allegations of voter fraud.
However, the political turnaround that Moreno made in the course of his government led him to approach the current president. Lasso, who defines himself as a liberal who believes in good ideas and not ideologies, has promised to put an end to the left-wing policies promoted during the Rafael Correa government. In this sense, he has said that the vote for his opponent Arauz is synonymous with returning to correismo and that this could lead Ecuador to become a new Venezuela.
