Tough prospects for Daniel Noboa

ECUADOR - In Brief 09 Feb 2025 by Magdalena Barreiro

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By 9 pm, February 9th, with 56% of polls having been counted, President Daniel Noboa who started leading the presidential race with 6% over Luisa Gonzalez, is now down to less than 2% of difference. The sample should be pretty stable at this point thus, this difference might continue until tomorrow, when we expect 95%+ of votes would have been counted and the Electoral Court can announce an official result. Noboa wins in the Andean region, but Gonzalez proves that support for Correistas not only failed to go down, but also has risen in the coastal region. These results confirm our worst fears of a probable error in the latest polls published January 31, when the percentage of indecisive votes was still high, at around 48% (many of these “indecisive votes” were just hidden votes for Revolucion Ciudadana). Leonidas Iza came in at a distant third place with around 5% of votes, but this outcome is just one of the many challenges Noboa will face in the second round, as a majority of those votes will probably go to Luisa, leaving Noboa the possibility to capture the 2.8%+ from Andrea Gonzalez (Sociedad Patriotica). It was easy to campaign against Noboa, who faced tough problems at the end of 2024 with the severe drought and electricity sector problems. We have been emphasizing since July last year that this was going to be a costly problem, and so it has been. And it was even easier to campaign against Noboa given the difficulties he faced in embracing an open and strong campaign due to the legal limitations from the problem with Vice President Abad. This problem has not gone away, and the history of presidential campaigns has taught us that this interim period is of the utm...