Ecuador’s election and regional political trends

Anti-incumbency, a rejection of traditional parties, and a fight on the left over the environment.

Above: Map of first round election results from El Universo

It’s trendy to take a single Latin American election and try to extrapolate to explain politics across the entire region. Ecuador’s first round was the most recent election to serve as a symbol to explain all of Latin American politics. We all know the limits of this type of analysis (every country is different!), but we all read it anyway because of a desire for big frameworks to explain things.

You’ve likely already read articles about what the election says about populism and the fight over the influence of former leaders. Below I offer a few other trends that the results show.

Widespread anger at the whole political system. There was around 81% turnout (voting is mandatory), but about 1.2 million voters cast a blank or null ballot for president out of the 9.5 million who voted. Even worse, almost a quarter of the ballots for Congress, over two million of them, were invalid and most of those were null ballots that appeared to be protest votes against the entire political system. Imagine having 16 candidates and 17 parties to choose from and deciding you’ll just deface your ballot instead to send a message. If the protest voters received seats in Congress, they’d be the second largest party. This wasn’t an unusually large protest vote in Ecuador, but combined with the number of people who polls show didn’t have a strong preference and dislike most of the main candidates, there is a problem here.

Collapsing traditional political parties. The UPE, the party of Arauz and Correa, is practically brand new, though it follows the line of pro-Correa parties that have existed in recent years. CREO and the PSC, the two main rightwing parties, dropped from a combined 35% of the vote in 2017 to 19% of the vote this year. Pachakutik and the Izquierda Democratica, neither of which won over 5% in 2017, were the main beneficiaries, winning 17% and 12% of the vote to become the second and third largest parties in the legislature. 

Failure to renew political leadership. Running Guillermo Lasso yet again was a huge mistake for the political right in Ecuador. While running the previous election’s runner-up used to be a solid strategy, voters are rejecting parties that keep running the same candidates. Even as they reject incumbents, a population angry at the entire political class wants fresh faces from the opposition too.

Rejection of austerity. I considered calling this a collapse of the right side of the political spectrum, but that’s not correct regionally. There remains a very strong right side of the political spectrum backed in part by the Evangelical and conservative wings of the Catholic Church. However, that strength is based more around social issues than economic ones. Lasso’s failed candidacy and the poor showing by CREO and the PSC are a rejection of pro-austerity economic policies and I do think that is a trend that can apply regionally. Voters are rejecting candidates who propose cuts in government spending.

A divided left. The leading candidate, Andres Arauz, defines himself as a leftist and is likely to reject the terms of the current IMF agreements with the country. The likely second place candidate, Yaku Perez, definitely has leftist economic leanings. The fourth place candidate, Xavier Hervas, defines himself as a center-left businessman who has also protested mining projects in the country. But the fact that three leftwing candidates took about two-thirds of the valid vote should not be seen as a return of the “Pink Tide.” There are large differences among these candidates that in many ways speak to a new generation of the left.

First, there is a rejection of the populism and individual leadership of Correa. The “pink tide” ended up being defined by specific charismatic leaders in each country and many of those leaders had authoritarian tendencies. In Bolivia, we saw this play out as Arce tried to limit the influence of Evo Morales and was able to expand his base because of that strategy. There is a large portion of the left in Ecuador including Perez that rejects Correa’s authoritarian leanings in Ecuador. Arauz will have a more difficult time than Arce figuring out how to balance the influence of his former boss. 

Second, there is a big fight brewing on the region’s political left over the overlapping issues of the environment, indigenous rights and the rights of prior consultation of local communities on extractive projects. While environmentalism is often seen more as a leftwing issue on the left-right political spectrum, the left that has gained power in Latin America over the past two decades has often been quite anti-environment. Maduro, AMLO and Correa, in particular, can all be seen within an extractives nationalism framework that is quite bad for the environment of the region and often goes against the desires of local communities and vulnerable populations. Correa’s occasional lip service to environmentalism was certainly not enough for the indigenous communities while he was president. If the second round fight in Ecuador ends up being Arauz vs Perez, it’s going to be one that is very much defined by the failings of Correa and his protege on environmental and indigenous issues during the previous administration. To the extent that Ecuador’s election echoes regionally, this is a fight worth watching.

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