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Ecuador: BREAKING NEWS Early results show Lasso win UPDATED

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As surprising as the Brexit and Trump wins, early results show Guillermo Lasso as the winner of today’s runoff presidential election.

Earlier this afternoon, El Universo declared “Guillermo Lasso, nuevo presidente de Ecuador, según exit poll de Cedatos” (Guillermo Lasso, new president of Ecuador, according to Cedatos exit poll). In exit polls of 36,000 voters, Cedatos found

GUILLERMO LASSO 53,02 %
LENÍN MORENO 46,98 %

Polling organization Cedatos had previously shown leftist (and friend of the late Hugo Chávez) president Rafael Correa’s hand-picked successor, Lenín Moreno, ahead by at least five percentage points.

There is no word from the elections commission on how soon official results will be made available, but Lasso tweeted in the last hour,

“Democracy won, FREEDOM won in Ecuador.”

As for Julian Assange,

UPDATE
10:30pm Moreno declared winner by CNE (National Election Council).

Lasso’s coalition press conference on Facebook Live 10:33pm Eastern time. The speaker claims that the CNE is reversing the counts, i.e., assigning Lasso’s votes to Moreno.

The CNE website is still down.

Reuters: Leftist claims victory in Ecuador, conservative asks for recount

The first runoff results were not made public for almost four days.

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Ecuador: Leftist mob attacks opposition’s presidential candidate VIDEO

A mob of Lenín Moreno supporters disrupted a soccer game Guillermo Lasso was attending, and attacked attacked Lasso and his family as they left the stadium.

Frances Martel reports,

A leftist mob, some have identified as paid agitators, violently attacked Ecuador’s center-right presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and his family Tuesday night as they attempted to leave a soccer match in the nation’s capital, Quito.

The mob – reportedly armed with bottles, sticks, stones, and knives – jeered the presidential candidate and his family and injured police detail assigned to escort the family out of Quito’s Atahualpa Olympic Stadium where Ecuador’s national soccer team was facing Colombia’s for a spot in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The crowd shouted, “out, banker!” at Lasso – whose pre-politics career was in finance – while making noise with vuvuzelas and hurling projectiles at the family.
. . .

“When we left the stadium, Alianza Paz [leftist party] militants began throwing bottles, sticks, and threatened us with knives,” Lasso said in a statement to the press. “All I could do was protect my wife with my body and receive the blows from the objects on my head.”

Lasso tweeted video of the incident,

The video clearly shows violent crowds pelting police officers and the Lasso family while hurling epithets at them. The younger Lasso accuses the government of socialist president Rafael Correa of hiring paid agitators to attack the family.

“My son Santiago narrates what we went through yesterday. The images speak for themselves. We don’t want this Ecuador for our children”

While the official surveys show Moreno ahead by five percentage points, 16 percent of their respondents said they were undecided.

Correa’s party has a lot riding on this election, as Mary O’Grady noted,

Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.

Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.

Correa vowed to annul the election results if Moreno doesn’t win next Sunday, through a maneuver by which the Ecuadorian Constitution allows him to dissolve the Executive and Judiciary branches and call for new elections.

In-country sources confirmed that OAS election monitors will not be allowed to be present at the electoral board headquarters.

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Ecuador: O’Grady on the upcoming election

Mary O’Grady analyzes Julian Assange and Ecuador’s Election

WikiLeaks’ founder is rooting for the leftist incumbent’s party. No one else should.

O’Grady explains,

In Brazil, Argentina and Peru, where democratic institutions have held up, antidemocratic demagogues have been turned out of office in recent years. But it’s too late for Venezuela and Bolivia, both of which are now full-blown dictatorships.

Colombia has lost its proud republican tradition of institutional checks on the executive. Last year President Juan Manuel Santos dismissed the results of a national plebiscite, declared amnesty for drug-trafficking FARC terrorists, and gave them seats in Congress.

Now is Ecuador’s moment of truth.

Mr. Correa has a thirst for power, an affinity for Twitter and a bullying manner. He was an acolyte of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013. During Mr. Correa’s decade in power, civil liberties and the rule of law have disintegrated in Ecuador.

In 2015 Mr. Correa changed the constitution to allow indefinite re-election of a president after 2017. This change ought to have required a national referendum. But since he didn’t have popular backing, he used his control of Congress to get it rubber-stamped. It doesn’t take much speculation to conclude that Mr. Correa is hoping to add his name to a growing list of Latin American dictators: Peron, Castro, Chávez, Ortega, Morales.

Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.

Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.

Read the whole thing.

Related:
Ecuador’s ruling party candidate takes lead ahead of presidential vote

Lasso Wants to Win Ecuador Runoff so as to Contribute to Democracy in Latin America

The runoff is scheduled for next Sunday, April 2d.

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Ecuador: Runoff on April 2d

Ecuador Presidential Vote to Go to Second Round Runoff in April

Emili Blasco reports El partido de Correa se atasca en la Asamblea del Ecuador. El empate en diputados entre el oficialismo y la oposición acaba con la mayoría cualificada que montó el sistema bolivariano [Correa’s party stymied in Ecuador’s Assembly. The deadlock between the ruling party and the opposition ends the qualified majority that set up the bolivarian system.]

Uncertainty in Ecuador as Votes Trickle In, Opposition Confident in Second Round

Reports of voter fraud in Ecuador leaves country on the cusp of becoming another Cuba or Venezuela

Ecuador presidential election headed for an April runoff. With the Andean country on tenterhooks and the opposition protesting for prompt results, the electoral body said it was waiting for all ballots to be counted before officially proclaiming a second round.

Should Ecuador move to the right with a second-round victory for Lasso, it would end a decade of leftist rule in Ecuador and follow on the heels of Argentina, Brazil and Peru which have all swerved away from the left as a China-led commodities boom ended.

Lasso has campaigned on a platform to revive the economy, which is dependent on exports of oil, flowers and shrimp, by slashing taxes, fostering foreign investment and creating a million jobs in four years.

He has also vowed to remove Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London and denounce Venezuela’s Socialist government.

Ecuador officials deny fraud claims in presidency vote

I’m very glad I was wrong.



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Ecuador: No election results until . . . Thursday? UPDATED

One thing for sure, had Lenín won by a large margin, there would be no wait.

Ecuadoreans are growing impatient at the slow pace of vote counting with the results of the presidential poll delayed until Wednesday or Thursday.

National Electoral Council President Juan Pablo Pozo called on Ecuadoreans to “wait for the results with calm”.

“There are very tight margins to establish whether there will be a second round or not,” he said.

He blamed the delay on “numerical inconsistencies” in 5.5% of the ballots, while he said others were missing signatures from polling station officials.

Carlos Alberto Montaner voices concern on electoral fraud (video in Spanish), since a Lasso could win a second round,

Rafael Correa says he’ll move to Belgium at the end of his term (why Belgium?), but there’s speculation as to whether he’d run again in four years.

UPDATE
Last night’s demonstrations,

“Ecuador awakened after a ten year nightmare”

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Ecuador: Runoff unlikely

At The Guardian, Ecuador election: Moreno facing runoff as 40% vote looks out of reach. With almost 90% of votes counted, candidate for incumbent party just short of 40% required for outright victory

With 87% of votes counted early on Monday morning, the national electoral council gave 39.09% to Moreno, who was a former vice-president under the outgoing Rafael Correa, and 28.28% to Lasso, a 61-year-old former banker. For an outright win a candidate needs 40% and a 10-point lead over his nearest rival.

Moreno was already celebrating.

As the WSJ points out,

The election is the first time in a decade that Mr. Correa, who was legally barred from running, wasn’t on the ballot.

The opposition demands a recount,

These are 5 things you need to know about Ecuador’s elections.

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Ecuador: If Lasso wins, Assange will need new digs

Ecuador presidential hopeful promises to evict Julian Assange from embassy. Presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso says costly asylum no longer justified. WikiLeaks founder has been living at London embassy for four and a half years

Julian Assange will be given a month’s notice to leave the Ecuadorian embassy if the country’s main opposition candidate wins the presidency in next week’s election.

In an interview with the Guardian, Guillermo Lasso, of the rightwing Creo-Suma alliance, said it was time for the WikiLeaks founder to move on because his asylum was expensive and no longer justified.

The Correa-designated candidate, Lenín Moreno (yes. Lenin for you), is ahead in the polls, but odds are the election will go to a runoff.

Tiko-Tiko the clown is also running for congress under Correa’s party.

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Ecuador: The spending campaign

Ecuador will be holding a presidential election next month, on February 19. Rafael Correa is not running, but his appointed successor, Lenín Moreno, is (emphasis added):

Mild-mannered Moreno, 63, who has used a wheelchair since a botched robbery in 1998, is running on a platform of continuing his boss’ policies. And, so far, the promise is working.
. . .
In some ways, Moreno is in a race against time. As oil prices have tanked, the administration has been able to hold off a deeper economic crisis by taking on more debt and loans against future oil exports. It’s racked up almost $14 billion in debt in 2016 alone, said Jose Hidalgo, with the conservative economic think-tank CORDES.

In a country with a total GDP of US$94 billion (a little over the GDP of New Mexico), that’s a big chunk of change.

Moreno’s running-mate and current Vice President Jorge Glas was in charge of Petroecuador when allegedly at least eight current and former officials were involved in bribery and money laundering by manipulating contracts. Glas maintains he was not involved.

The election may  go to a second round if the opposition rallies around a candidate. The latest poll showed Moreno leading with 35.6%, 13 points ahead of former banker and center-right candidate Guillermo Lasso, with 22.3%.

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