Keep left, or turn right

Valerie Hamilton -

Ecuadorians return to the polls on Sunday to elect a successor to President Rafael Correa, in a second-round presidential run-off between his hand-picked successor and a challenger who has vowed a reversal of course.

Correa’s former vice-president — Lenin Moreno, of the ruling leftist PAIS alliance — won 39.36 per cent of the vote in the election’s first round on February 19, falling just short of the 40 per cent and 10-point-lead necessary to win outright.

He will face off with second-place finisher, former banker Guillermo Lasso of the conservative Creo-Suma alliance, who won 28.09 per cent of the vote in the first round.

Moreno, 64, served as Correa’s vice-president until 2013, when he accepted an appointment as United Nations special envoy on disability. The author and former professor uses a wheelchair after a shooting in 1998 left him paraplegic. He has effectively run on his popular predecessor’s record, vowing to continue social programmes and an inclusive leftist agenda. Lasso, 61, a director of the country’s largest bank, Banco de Guayaquil, served previously as finance minister, provincial governor and US ambassador in the government of former president Yamil Mahud.

Political adversaries fault him for Ecuador’s 1999 financial crisis under Mahud’s government, accusations that have dogged his campaign.

In a campaign whose slogan is the single word “change,” he has promised to be everything Correa is not, promising jobs and economic renewal and a break from what some see as the current president’ s authoritarian rule.

Surveys ahead of the run-off by Ecuadorian polling form Cedatos showed Moreno with a 4-point lead, despite conservative congresswoman Cynthia Viteri, who finished third in the first round, throwing her support to Lasso. Eighty-five per cent of voters polled said their minds were made up. Voting is mandatory in Ecuador and 12.8 million voters are eligible to take part. Among issues of public concern are the economy, which has been battered by falling oil prices, as well as environmental protection, corruption and taxes. The vote could also decide the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up at Ecuador’s Embassy in London since Correa agreed in 2012 to shield him from extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Lasso said ahead of the first round that, if elected, he would evict Assange from the embassy within 30 days of taking office. He has since backtracked on that pledge, telling the US newspaper Miami Herald he would work to find Assange refuge in another embassy “to protect his rights.”

More recently, South America has been moving to the right. Recent elections have favoured centre-right candidates in neighbouring Peru and Argentina, and 13 years of leftist rule in Brazil ended with the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff in August 2016. — dpa