Ecuador presidential election heads to second round

Ecuador’s presidential election will go to a second round in April after none of the 16 candidates won enough votes to be declared the winner in the first attempt on Sunday.

Leftwing economist Andrés Arauz, who turned 36 on Saturday and would be the country’s youngest-ever president, ended the day with a comfortable lead but he was well short of the 40 per cent threshold required to avoid a run-off.

The National Electoral Council (CNE) said Arauz won 31.5 per cent of the vote, putting him about 11 percentage points clear of his nearest rivals. Two exit polls gave him a similarly handsome lead.

It was unclear who Arauz would face in the run-off. Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez and Guillermo Lasso, a wealthy ex-banker, were in a technical tie for second place, with the CNE giving Pérez 20.04 per cent to Lasso’s 19.97 per cent.

The full official first-round results are not expected until later in the week.

Ecuador’s economy has dominated the election. The country, one of the poorest in South America, signed a $6.5bn lending agreement with the IMF and renegotiated the terms of its $17.4bn of sovereign debt with bondholders last year.

But Arauz has said the IMF’s conditions are too onerous and he would try to renegotiate the agreement, which calls for a fiscal adjustment of 5.5 percentage points by 2025 through a combination of tax reform and spending cuts.

Pérez has also criticised the IMF agreement and would be unlikely to abide by it.

Even Lasso, the most economically orthodox of the three, has refused to endorse the tax rises the IMF advocates.

“Whoever wins, sovereign debt risks will remain very high,” Capital Economics said in a research note this week. “And the bond market could go into tailspin if . . . Arauz wins and follows through with his pledge to scrap IMF-mandated reforms.” 

An Arauz victory could pave the way for Rafael Correa, the former president who stepped down in 2017 and has been living in Belgium, to return to Ecuador. Correa was sentenced in absentia last year to eight years in jail for corruption. Arauz has said he is confident the courts will annul the verdict if he wins the presidency and that Correa would serve as a consultant to his government.

The vote took place against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, with voters obliged to wear face masks and advised to bring their own pens to mark their ballot papers. In a country where voting is mandatory, there were long queues outside polling stations and most people appeared to observe social distancing, though crowds gathered in some places.

One of the oldest voters was Arauz’s 106-year-old grandmother, who accompanied him to a polling station in Quito.