Less than a month before the presidential elections, and according to the measurements of I don’t know how many credible polls, the facts are very clear, on the one hand, that the candidate of the Civil Revolution is almost guaranteed to appear in the second election round, and on the other, that there will certainly be significant uncertainty about the second-placed candidate until the day of the election itself. It is unlikely that Luisa González will win in one round, but she will certainly have a percentage of around 30%, which is synonymous with the strength of this movement, but also its limitations.

News about the 2023 presidential election in Ecuador

In this context, it is usually mentioned that correísmo has an electoral support base of between 25% and 30% of the electorate, in fact the largest at the national level, however, it also has a very high percentage of disapproval, which allows the unification of voices against correísmo; It was also pointed out that this perception has decreased in recent years, and the results of the last sectional elections with a clear victory for the correísta candidate are mentioned as proof. In any case, it is undeniable that the movement of former President Rafael Correa continues to maintain that compact voice, which has been analyzed in various ways, including electoral clientelism, populist profile, caudillismo, cultural level of the electorate, voice of disillusionment, etc., factors usually used to explain political phenomena in Latin America.

fragile memory

Nevertheless, I have the impression that political and cultural analysis has failed to embed, with real acuity, the foundations of the brilliance that Rafael Correa continues to produce in a significant percentage of this country’s electorate; Six years have passed since he left power, and his validity among those 25 to 30 percent of the electorate is still remarkable. The point is that few have stopped to think objectively about whether this recognition, which is associated with a kind of gratitude imprinted on the collective imagination and which defies the usual concepts of political science, can be effectively countered by leadership that conforms to popular expectations. In this sense, a different analysis is given that attributes the direct responsibility for the longing for the Civil Revolution to the later rulers, in this case Lenín Moreno and Guillermo Lasso, who simply did not have the dimension to dilute the validity and essence of correísma.

In June of last year, the current president stated that he had set the goal that the correístas would never return to power. At this moment, it is obvious that the president’s intentions have fallen into the most absolute vacuum, to the extent that the door has been opened for the eventual return of correísmo.

The problem is this: when you’re traveling at night and you’re blinded by an oncoming vehicle, the options are very clear: change your lights, turn on your lights, or just keep driving. But never, ever turn off the lights. (OR)