The result of the election on Sunday would be influenced by the dominant presence of the new generation in the democratic election of the new president. The persuasiveness of yesterday’s skillful political leaders no longer permeates the will of the new participants in the majority decision. And that is that the perception of such leaders is no longer in line with the priorities of the more informed “new wave”.

What circumstances contributed to González and Noboa being in the top two spots in the first round?

It could happen that certain political hierarchs do not recognize the gravitating phenomenon in new voters. They are distant and distrust traditional politics; There are even those like the Spaniard Jorge Benedict (professor of sociology at UNED), who points out that the new generation is locked in a tangle of structural and institutional factors that elude their ability to make decisions. He suggests that young people from the beginning of the 21st century, “… are sailing in a sea of ​​uncertainty, negotiating their own path between opportunities and risks (…) in the field of politics (…) which is passively taken over by the political universe of negative and pessimistic meanings.. .”. However, there is no such passivity on the national scene; perhaps it was abandoned due to threats of insecurity, especially those whose main goal is to see Friday alive, as one respected lawyer confided to me: “… I voted for Topić, because we just need to live, not ‘Let’s not let them kill us!!, we’ll see how we can adjust our economies”. Other young people like her told me of their concerns about few (or no) opportunities for proper employment. They voted for a possible change, amid campaign offers littered with simple, outdated, trite and hollow messages; such as those of candidate González, who introduced the crutch that her mentor had already solved population problems in the past and she would apply the same formula.

Undoubtedly, generic arguments did not answer all the concerns of young voters, for whom emigration is not the best option, but Noboa still convinced them in the discussion “because he had figures, he seemed calm and did not enter into the game of despair; He didn’t lose direction or avoid questions, he gave sensible answers… without his father’s joke”.

Other opinions, without hiding their “correísmo”, admitted that they favored Luisa González, after thinking: “… okay, there was and will be corruption in every government, unfortunately we have normalized it (even though it is wrong), but in at least this brief agreement from the past will be restored so that the drug gangs do what they have to do and not violently lash out at civil society.” However, other supporters believe that she represents them, because of her social policy offers, that right-wing candidates are not listened to”.

In short, the new generation dictates the rules of politics. (OR)