Conservative President Noboa secures re-election in Ecuador
Ecuadorians have re-elected President Daniel Noboa as the country continues to grapple with high levels of drug violence.
With 92% of all ballots counted, the 37-year-old conservative incumbent led his leftist opponent, the lawyer Luisa González, by 55.8% to 44%.
National Electoral Council President Diana Atamaint said the results showed an “irreversible trend” in favour of Noboa.
However, González, whose political project is tied to the divisive ex-President Rafael Correa, has refused to accept the result of Sunday’s election.
“We are going to demand a recount,” González told her supporters in Quito.
Noboa, who assumed the presidency in November 2023 after a snap election, criticised González for calling the result into question.
“I find it embarrassing that with an 11- or 12-point difference, they come out to question the will of the Ecuadorians,” Noboa said.
“Ecuadorians have already spoken, now we have to get to work,” he added.
Sunday’s election followed a tight first-round vote in February, which Noboa won by fewer than 17,000 votes.
Both Noboa and González’s campaigns focused heavily on their plans to tackle the country’s recent spike in violence, which is linked to the trafficking of cocaine from neighbouring Colombia and Peru.
They promised tough-on-crime policies, better equipment for law enforcement and international help to fight drug cartels and local criminal groups.
Noboa, who is heir to a fortune built on the banana trade, declared Ecuador to be in a state of “internal armed conflict” in January 2024, allowing him to deploy thousands of soldiers to the streets to combat gangs and to charge people with terrorism counts for alleged ties to organised crime groups.
His opponents have criticised him for what they see as a string of authoritarian moves.
Under his watch, Ecuador’s homicide rate dropped from 46.18 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 38.76 per 100,000 people in 2024. But despite the decrease, the rate remained far higher than the 6.85 homicides per 100,000 people seen in 2019.
González’s defeat marks the third consecutive time that the party of Correa, the country’s most influential president this century, failed to return to the presidency.
ADVERTISEMENTElectoral observers from the Organisation of American States and the European Union monitored the vote, but have not released their reports.
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