QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador will head to a runoff presidential election between a socialist ally of former president Rafael Correa and a surprising rival — a millennial entrepreneur who was considered a long-shot candidate just days ago.
With the majority of votes counted, Luisa González, a leftist former lawmaker and aide to Correa, won about 33 percent of the vote Sunday night, falling short of the lead she needed to become president in the first round of the election. Polls had predicted she would advance to a second round with one of two right-leaning candidates who focused on iron-fisted solutions to the country’s drug violence, particularly in the days after the brazen assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
Instead, voters chose Daniel Noboa, a 35-year-old former lawmaker and son of a well-known businessman, whose message appeared to cut through the political fighting in this South American nation, analysts say. Noboa won about 24 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results. In third place was journalist Christian Zurita, who replaced Villavicencio and ran on a ballot that had already been printed with the late candidate’s name.
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“Our main alliance will be with the Ecuadoran people and we are open to agreements with any other candidate,” Noboa said in an address broadcast on social media. “Young people chose Daniel Noboa.”
Noboa’s performance in a debate last week, just days after the killing of Villavicencio, appealed to undecided voters who were tired of the fierce political battle that has long consumed Ecuadoran elections — between supporters and opponents of Correa, said Caroline Avila, an Ecuadoran analyst and expert in political communication.
“There is no specific promise,” Avila said of Noboa. “He is not the security candidate. But he is the candidate that offers a refreshing, young kind of politics that isn’t stained with conflict.”
The presidential vote was unusual from the start. President Guillermo Lasso triggered the fast-track election in May after dissolving the legislature and moving to rule by decree in a last-ditch effort to avoid impeachment. Lasso, one of the few remaining conservative leaders in the region, was the first Ecuadoran president to apply a constitutional move known as a muerte cruzada — roughly, “mutual death.” The device allows the president to dissolve the legislature but also triggers new elections, including for the executive branch. (Lasso declined to run.)
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Then, on Aug. 9, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was fatally shot in the head by a hit man while leaving a campaign rally in northern Quito. His death, the first assassination of a presidential candidate in Ecuador, stunned the nation, dramatically shifted the election cycle, and marked a turning point for a country that has begun losing control of its cities and prisons to violent criminal organizations.
“There is a certain feeling of insecurity,” said Byron Torres, a 45-year-old doctor voting in northern Quito on Sunday morning. “Normally when we vote, we go out as a family. Today, I decided to leave my daughters at home.”
Amid threats of violence on election day, around 100,000 security forces were deployed across the country to maintain order. Authorities did not report any major incidents at the polls.
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But officials said the country’s elections faced a different kind of threat Sunday. Ecuador’s electronic voting system for those living abroad suffered cyberattacks in seven countries: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia and China, said Diana Atamaint, president of Ecuador’s electoral council. The attacks did not affect the consigned votes, Atamaint said, but they did prevent thousands of voters from registering and accessing the system throughout the morning. More than 400,000 Ecuadorans abroad were eligible to vote in the election.
Intelligence reports provided to The Washington Post confirmed the credentials to access the electoral system were sold on the dark web. The hackers uploaded a tool so that anyone could attack the system, according to intelligence officials.
Since Villavicencio’s assassination, the candidates focused on tough-on-crime approaches to bringing control to the prisons, boosting police capabilities and rooting out corruption in the country.
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Squeezed between the world’s two biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, this South American nation has become a key transit point for the trafficking of drugs to the United States and Europe. Mexican cartels and Albanian mafias have swept in, working with local criminal groups to compete for control of smuggling routes. Those groups have turned the country’s prisons, streets and ports into battlegrounds, bringing record levels of homicides and terrorizing residents with car bombs, extortion and kidnappings.
The next president will have very little time to introduce any solutions to the insecurity — only the 18 months remaining of Lasso’s term. The runoff election is scheduled for Oct. 15.
Most polls showed three candidates leading a field of eight: González; Otto Sonnenholzner, a vice president during the administration of Lenín Moreno; and Jan Topic, a tough-on-crime businessman who drew comparisons to the controversial Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
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González has focused her campaign message on bringing back the prosperity and relative safety of the Correa years. The former president, who was convicted of corruption, continues to be a popular and influential politician in Ecuador, praised for his social programs that helped narrow inequality in the country.
“For the first time, a woman goes to the second round in a presidential election,” González said Sunday night. She said the vote reflects a country “that wants peace, but also a country that needs medicine and employment.”
González rode a wave of wins for Correa’s party in local elections earlier this year, but her lead in the polls slipped after the assassination of Villavicencio, who was a harsh critic of Correa. There is no evidence linking Correa’s party to the killing, but the attack prompted a backlash against his supporters.
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Noboa stayed out of that debate, and his surprising success on Sunday reflects a populace that is fed up with it, said Avila, the analyst.
Noboa, who studied at U.S. universities including Harvard and New York University, is the son of a well-known banana magnate and six-time presidential candidate, Álvaro Noboa. His campaign has focused not just on combating insecurity, but also on job growth. At the presidential debate last week, he portrayed himself as a technocrat with data and practical solutions, said Fernando Carrión, a political scientist at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Ecuador.
“Nobody paid attention to Daniel Noboa,” Carrión said, adding that for that reason, no one criticized him either. “He’s not seen as a politician.”
At a bakery just blocks away from the site of Villavicencio’s killing in Quito, voters last week watched recaps of the debate that caused many to start paying attention to Noboa. Outside the bakery, customer Pedro Ortega said he planned to vote for the party of Villavicencio in honor of the late candidate he had supported.
But he was surprised by how well Noboa had performed in the debate. Many of the other candidates seemed underprepared or made promises that would be impossible to keep, Ortega said.
After Villavicencio’s death, he said, “there was a void.”
And for many voters, Noboa appeared to fill it.
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