In a repeat of the previous presidential election, Ecuadorians went to the polls on February 9, 2025, to select a new government. The wealthy business owner Daniel Noboa is headed to a runoff race in April against the progressive candidate Luisa González. In a closely divided race, Noboa edged out González, with both winning about 44 percent of the vote. Less than one percent of voting preferences divided the two candidates.
To win the first round outright in Ecuador, a candidate must receive more than 50 percent of the votes, or 40 percent of the votes with a 10-point margin over the nearest rival. Noboa defeated González in a similarly tightly contested election in 2023. The former president, Guillermo Lasso, who was facing inevitable impeachment, invoked an innovative provision of the 2008 Constitution known as muerte cruzada (mutually assured death). This allows the president to dissolve Congress and call for new snap elections. Noboa subsequently served out the remainder of Lasso’s term and is now running for reelection. Luisa González is running for the second time as the candidate of Revolución Ciudadana (Citizen’s Revolution), the party of former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
The election highlighted divisions between Noboa’s neoliberal policies of austerity, deregulation, and privatization and Revolución Ciudadana’s emphasis on social funding for healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other social priorities. Noboa has closely allied himself with U.S. President Donald Trump, together with Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. He has also aligned himself with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, including indicating a willingness to accept deportees from the United States.
The 37-year-old Noboa is a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who was born in Miami to the banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man who had previously led five failed campaigns for the presidency. Daniel Noboa first won election to the country’s legislature in 2021. After a strong debate performance in the 2023 elections, he rose from the bottom of the polls to place second in the first round. He subsequently beat González in the second round.
Some have cast this election as the third round of the 2023 general election. In that case, the April runoff could be characterized as a fourth round, with many of the same issues still at play. Among the problems that Ecuador faces are drug-fueled violence, high unemployment rates, and an energy crisis that has triggered a massive outflow of Ecuadorians to the United States. The election highlighted the highly polarized nature of Ecuadorian society. Correa’s backers remember his decade in office as a period of economic strength, plunging rates of poverty and inequality, and a drop in violence. Correa’s opponents, ironically, blame the country’s current problems with narcotrafficking, electricity blackouts, and economic issues on his rule while at the same time claiming that Noboa has not had enough time to resolve these issues. They cast Correa as an authoritarian and corrupt politician, while Correa’s backers hurl the exact charges back at Noboa.
In the face of drug-fueled violence and a series of deadly prison riots, Noboa has imposed a series of 10 states of siege and declared a state of internal armed conflict that allowed him to dispatch the military to patrol the streets and prisons. Opponents accuse Noboa of authoritarian overreach that threatens civil liberties. In a brazen breach of diplomatic protocol, he sent the police into the Mexican embassy in Quito in April 2024 to arrest Correa’s former vice president Jorge Glas, who had sought political asylum. That action led Mexico to break diplomatic relations with Ecuador (since June 2024, Switzerland represents the diplomatic interests of Ecuador in Mexico and vice versa).
From his initial campaign in 2023, Noboa famously tangled badly with his chosen vice presidential candidate, Verónica Abad. After winning the election, Noboa attempted to remove Abad by sending her on diplomatic missions, first to Israel and then to Turkey. Under Ecuador’s electoral law, current politicians need to step aside while running for reelection so as not to make inappropriate use of government resources for their campaigns. Noboa made the dubious argument that he did not need to comply with those regulations, because rather than running for reelection he was completing Lasso’s truncated term. When the Constitutional Court did not accept this argument, he named others to the role of vice president and stepped aside for several hours or days at a time—both of questionable legality. In this contest, Noboa selected María José Pinto González Artigas as his running mate (the Ecuadorian electoral law requires a gender balance on the presidential tickets).
Noboa and González were at the head of a crowded field of 16 candidates. In the campaign period, the National Electoral Council (CNE) eliminated the right-wing law and order candidate Jan Topić from the ballot because of contentious charges that he held state contracts not permitted under electoral law. If he had not been eliminated from the running, Topić might have polled as much as 20 percent—taken mainly from Noboa’s vote —which may have given González a first-round victory. Most of the rest of the candidates ranged politically from the center to the right. They represented personalistic or clientalistic interests and had trouble polling above one percent of the vote.
The only other leftist candidate in the presidential race was Leonidas Iza, the president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and the candidate for Pachakutik, an Indigenous-aligned political movement. Iza says that his platform also represents the interests of poor whites, mestizos, Afro-Ecuadorians, and others. Unlike the other candidates, Iza presented his campaign not as an individualistic or egotistical effort but as a collective movement. He placed third with over five percent of the vote, in line with his hopes and expectations but significantly better than polls had indicated.
Iza identifies himself as a Marxist and Leninist as filtered through the lens of the organic ideas of the early-20th century Peruvian theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, but also as someone influenced by Christian ideas of love for humanity. His parents, in fact, named him after Leonidas Proaño, the so-called “bishop of the Indians” who helped organize rural communities in the 1960s and 1970s. Iza’s campaign represented lingering tensions between Ecuador’s powerful grassroots social movements and Correa’s electoral project that brought him to the presidency for the first time in 2007. At that time, Correa tried but failed to bring Indigenous and other movements under his control. Consequentially, the two conflicted badly, especially over Correa’s extractivist policies, even as they strove for broadly similar goals of reducing poverty and inequality. In advance of this election, an attempt by a range of leftist groups to form a common front failed. It appears that these internal divisions may never heal.
Since its formation in 1995, Pachakutik has struggled to win more than two percent of the vote for its presidential candidates. Significantly, Yaku Pérez, its candidate in the 2021 race, won 20 percent of the vote and fell just short of passing to the second round and possibly the presidency. In retrospect, the vote total appears to be an anomaly that, among other factors, was due to Pérez’s strong environmentalist credentials. The persistence of blatant racist sentiments seems to be a significant factor in limiting the appeal of Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian candidates. Over the years, Pachakutik’s showing in local and parliamentary races has varied widely.
Also on the ballot on Sunday were races for the expanded 151-seat national assembly and the Andean parliament. The national assembly is composed of provincial delegates, five national delegates, and delegates representing Ecuadorians residing outside of the country. All the parliamentary races are by party list rather than individual candidates. The election results for the parliamentary races were similarly closely divided between Noboa’s party, the National Democratic Action (ADN), and Gonzalez’s Revolución Ciudadana.
At this point, it is impossible to tell which candidate has the upper hand in April’s run-off race. Nothing in this election indicates that a new government will have simple solutions to Ecuador’s many problems, or that the deeply polarized political environment will be easily addressed. In the face of that reality, whomever wins in April will have to contend with a potentially antagonistic Congress and popular expectations that may be impossible to fulfill.
Marc Becker is the author among other works of Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements (2008) and Pachakutik: Indigenous movements and electoral politics in Ecuador (2011). He is currently writing a book on Philip Agee and the CIA in Ecuador in the early 1960s. He observed the 2025 Ecuadorian elections with a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
