Andrés Arauz Guillermo Lasso
lapressed
Sunday 11 April after an important election date in South America. In the two main countries of the Andean area, Ecuador and Peru, we go to vote in the presidential elections. In the first case it is the ballot, in the second case the first round. We should also have voted in Chile, but the polls have been postponed to May 15-16 due to the pandemic situation.
ECUADOR ELECTIONS: PRESIDENTIAL BALLOT BETWEEN LEFT ECONOMIST ARAUZ AND RIGHT BANK LASSO
Let’s start with Ecuador, where about 13.1 million citizens go to the polls to elect the next president from the left-wing economist, Andrès Arauz, and the former right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso. The latest polls predict a tightening head to head between the 36-year-old Arauz, who won the first round of the presidential elections last February, with 32.72% of the vote, and the 65-year-old Lasso, who finished second with 19.74%; but the right-wing candidate got the better of the last televised debate and would have a slight advantage over his rival. For observers, the figure of the former left-wing president in political exile in Belgium will hover over the vote, Rafael Correa – in power from 2007 to 2017 – of which Arauz is the heir. But a “third wheel” is above all the native environmentalist, Yaku Perez, rejected by a few votes, who obtained 19.39% of the votes in the first round. Perez and his Pachakutik movement were the surprise of these presidential elections, but his appeals for fraud and the request for a recount were not accepted, so he called on supporters to choose the white ball on Sunday. For the Organization of American States (OEA) election observation mission, the first round was “honest”. In addition to Perez, another balance in the Ecuadorian vote is Xavier Hervas, new face of politics with a social-democratic formation that won over young voters, coming in fourth place with over 16%.
ECUADOR ELECTIONS, THE ROLE OF THE EXILIATED RUNS
From Belgium, Correa has closely followed the electoral campaign and his face has been included in the posters of Arauz, which if elected will probably take action to abandon the legal actions against Correa, thus allowing his return to Ecuador. The country has profoundly changed during its three terms. To succeed Correa was his dolphin, Lenin Moreno, who instead turned his back on the legacy of the left and made a political shift to the right. Both Arauz and Lasso have promised the population financial aid to react to the severe economic blow caused by the pandemic. The first proposed a subsidy of around 840 euros which should go to one million families. The second intends to raise the minimum wage from $ 400 to $ 500. The US currency is the only currency in circulation in the country after the abandonment of the local one – the sucre – in 2000. Ecuador is one of the nations most affected by Covid with over 339,000 infections and 17,000 victims, according to the reports officers. Currently struggling with the second wave, a curfew is still in place in eight of the 24 provinces, those in which 70% of the 17.5 million inhabitants live. The vaccination campaign is proceeding slowly as well as being accompanied by controversy due to the too many hours of waiting for the elderly and the unfair preference given to power figures such as journalists, sportsmen and teachers. Precisely for this situation, the Minister of Health has been changed four times.