Ecuador’s ruling party candidate appeared to be heading for victory in a presidential run-off that would cement the country’s reputation as a bastion of the Latin American left and provide breathing space for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
However, the narrow 51% to 49% lead for Lenin Moreno was contested by the opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso, prompting fears for heightened political tension in the days ahead.
With 96% of votes counted on Sunday night, Moreno, who was a former vice-president under outgoing president Rafael Correa, seemed to be on course to beat Lasso, a 61-year-old former banker.
The head of Ecuador’s electoral council, Juan Pablo Pozo, called on the opposition candidate to recognise the results. “Ecuador deserves the ethical responsibility from its political actors to recognise the democratic decision made by the people at the ballot box,” Pozo said.
However, Lasso, who earlier had claimed victory based on three exit polls that showed him leading by as much as six points, pointed to irregularities and demanded a recount.
“This is very sickening. We’re not going to allow it,” he said, calling on supporters to protest the results peacefully but firmly. “They’ve crossed a line, which is pretending to abuse the people’s will” and install an “illegitimate” government, Lasso said.
Several thousand of his supporters picketed the electoral council headquarters on Sunday night chanting: “We don’t want fraud, we want democracy.”
Meanwhile, Moreno appeared on a stage flanked by outgoing president Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas, the vice-president, as thousands of supporters waved flags in the lime-green colours of the Alianza País coalition and cumbia music blasted into the night.
Moreno called for dialogue with the opposition, saying: “We know how to hear the criticisms. Let’s work together in peace and harmony.
Dancing in the crowd, Marisol Jaramillo, 34, an agricultural worker said “Now the revolution will continue, life has changed for us over the last 10 years and want the progress to carry on.”
For the country’s 15 million population, at stake was whether to continue the redistributive policies of the ruling party, which won the previous three elections under Rafael Correa, including reduced poverty and improved access to education and healthcare. Correa’s administration had also been criticised for media censorship, corruption and abandoning many of its environmental promises.
The alternative offered by Lasso was a pro-business, pro-austerity programme that promised tax cuts and more jobs, though Lasso was plagued with accusations of tax avoidance through dozens of offshore accounts.
He also promised to ask Assange to leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London within a month of securing a mandate because he said the asylum granted to the WikiLeaks founder was posing a burden on the country’s taxpayers. Assange is reportedly sufficiently concerned to have instructed lawyers in Quito in case Lasso wins.
The election will also have regional ramifications. Should a Moreno victory be confirmed, it would cement Ecuador’s reputation as a bastion of the left in Latin America. Should he lose, it will be taken as another sign of the region’s retreating “pink wave”, following defeats for the left in an Argentinian election and a Bolivian referendum, plus the impeachment and ousting of Workers’ party president Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
With the stakes high in Ecuador, there were accusations of vote-rigging and other dubious practices during the first round, which was delayed because the result was close, though independent observers from the Union of South American Nations said there was no evidence of fraud and praised the election process as transparent.
The foreign minister, Guillaume Long, urged all involved not to discredit the process for political reasons. “It’s important that all sides accept the results that will be issued by the electoral authorities and show their democratic commitment without throwing around other false allegations or claiming that any defeat is due to irregularities,” he told the Guardian.
Earlier in the day, Moreno voted at a polling station in the middle-class Rumipampa neighbourhood of Quito, while his supporters gathered outside chanting: “You can see it, you can feel it, Lenin president.”
Moreno called for the election to be peaceful process. “Let the people make their decision,” he said.
As police formed a cordon to hold back the throng, voters – many of them supporters of opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso – protested that they could not enter the polling station to vote, as Moreno sympathisers jeered.
“I voted for Lasso, I voted for a change,” Maria Jose Maldonado, 33, a business administrator told the Guardian. “We don’t want a dictatorship we don’t want our freedom taken away, we don’t want to be like Venezuela,” she said, alluding to the move by the supreme court in Caracas to take over legislative powers in the opposition-controlled Venezuelan congress last week.
Casting his vote in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil, Lasso said: “This is a crucial day, this isn’t any election, here there’s a path; there’s a path to Venezuela or a path to democracy and freedom.”
At the polling station in Quito where Moreno voted, Nora Molina, 57, said she voted for him because “we have made a lot of progress in the last 10 years and we want it to continue”.
Voting with her young children, Patricia Romero, 37, said she backed Moreno: “I would like him to continue with the revolution which has helped us and he is genuinely concerned for the people.”
Carlos Muso, a 54-year-old taxi driver, said he had opted for Lasso because he would favour small businesses. “We need a change. Lasso is the best opportunity we have. We need a boost for the private sector, lots of companies have had to close and that’s no good,” he said.
Moreno’s supporters, draped in lime-green colours of the Alianza País coalition, marked the occasion with music on a stage erected on a main avenue the headquarters in Quito.
Lasso’s supporters had their own festivities in the port city of Guayaquil, where he voted, while hundreds more massed outside the country’s electoral board headquarters awaiting the final results.
While Lasso tweeted: “Democracy has won, freedom has won in Ecuador”, Correa called for calm and await the official results as “two exit polls have given absolutely contradictory results”. “Someone lies”, Correa tweeted.
It is the tightest race in living memory, said Santiago Basabe, a political scientist with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. “I don’t think we’ve ever had such a close election, so hard-fought with such a high level of uncertainty among the population,” he said.
The voter indecision is because the candidates lack the charisma and conviction of Correa, said Hernan Reyes, a political scientist at Quito’s Simon Bolivar Andean University.
“Neither candidate generated any kind of passion of the kind the Ecuadorean voter is used to,” he said.(Dan Collyns in Quito and Jonathan Watts)
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/03/ecuador-presidential-election-conflicting-exit-polls-signal-tight-finish
20
