Banana businessman Daniel Noboa will be the next president of Ecuador, after winning the second round this Sunday. Noboa, a 35-year-old liberal rightist, will become the youngest president in the history of the South American country after winning 52.30% of the votes over the progressive lawyer Luisa González, who obtained 47.70% of the votes. votes representing the Citizen Revolution, the political movement of former left-wing Bolivarian president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), convicted of corruption and exiled in Belgium.
“Today we begin to work to rebuild a country that has been seriously hit by violence, corruption and hatred; Hope begins to work tomorrow,” Noboa declared this morning (Spanish time) from the small coastal town of Olón, immediately after the National Electoral Council confirmed his victory as a candidate for the National Democratic Action party.
The president-elect was thus referring to the main challenge that his government will have in the short year and a half in which he will exercise his mandate. Ecuador is experiencing an unprecedented wave of violence and insecurity due to organized crime linked to drug trafficking at the service of Mexican cartels, which use the country to transport Colombian drugs to the Pacific.
In fact, the campaign was marked by the murder of one of the presidential candidates, Fernando Villavicencio, shot on August 9 – eleven days before the first round – at the exit of a rally in Quito by a Colombian hitman.
For her part, and despite the close result, Luisa González quickly acknowledged her defeat. “We have never called for a city to be burned down and we have never come out shouting fraud,” said the loser in Quito.
Noboa and his elected vice president, Verónica Abad, will only govern between next December and May 2025, since their mandate will expire when that of the current president, the also right-wing Guillermo Lasso, should have ended. Last May, the president dissolved the National Assembly and called presidential and legislative elections, before parliament removed him from office in an impeachment.
The legislative elections were held on August 20, coinciding with the first round, and the Citizen Revolution was imposed, although without an absolute majority. For its part, National Democratic Action, Noboa’s party, will only have 14 deputies, so it will not be easy for it to govern and carry out any of the transformations that Ecuador needs, which in addition to being immersed in a wave of violence, It is also suffering an economic crisis, with a quarter of the population below the poverty line.
Although Noboa describes himself as center-left, he is supported by long-standing right-wing formations and his victory represents the continuity of the liberal policies of Lasso and the vast majority of governments that the country has had throughout its history, with few exceptions, such as the Correísta decade.
Noboa is also heir to the Ecuadorian oligarchy. His father, billionaire Álvaro Noboa, tried unsuccessfully to be president five times.
The Noboa business empire was created by the president-elect’s grandfather, Luis Noboa, founder of Exportadora Bananera Noboa. Today, the Noboa Group is a business conglomerate with branches in different sectors, which has been denounced on numerous occasions for labor exploitation and tax evasion.
Daniel Noboa was born in Miami, studied Business Administration at New York University, Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School and Government and Political Communication at George Washington University. He is married to model and influencer Lavinia Valbonesi.
Almost as a declaration of intentions, the president-elect awaited the results on Sunday in a house on the beach, in Olón, 200 kilometers from Guayaquil, his family’s fiefdom, where he received journalists and guests. With a great deployment of security, the small coastal town became a coming and going of helicopters in which members of his family, leaders of parties that support Noboa and many businessmen arrived.
