The results of the last presidential election made it fashionable to talk about “generations” as an important factor in political dynamics. The four candidates who came forward are between 46 and 35 years old. Immediately, “analysts” began to use the age component as a key determinant in the final figures. A little deeper look shakes such a hypothesis. Four young people won because all the participants were young, since the candidate who would have been in second place according to serious measurements was eliminated with a clean bullet, he was a 60-year-old politician, seasoned, mature. The winner is the oldest of this group, and even her relative youth did not affect the triumph, but she capitalized on the strong voice of the populist current, what was obtained was close to what that aspect achieved in the last two elections.

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So far the facts. Based on them, we can explain that Daniel Noboa prevailed among the others, not because of his 35 years, but because of the presentation of a coherent approach, not broken by the correísmo/anti-correísmo split. It is not that such an opening of the Ecuadorian political reality is no longer important, but that solid anticorreismo was manifested in the high number of votes that Fernando Villavicencio received. That’s how most of the moderates left after Noboa. As we are all analysts the day after the election, most opted for the magical explanation of age, a convenient tool known to benefit the young and the dirty old. Let’s say “a breath of fresh air” and the rest of the gap to be in line with what the results say at first and only at first glance.

Time for a change

The classification of human society by generations has little more real value than by the signs of the zodiac. Instead of analyzing income, education, cultural affiliation and other boring categories, let’s talk about millennials and boomers, especially in English. As Karl Mannheim already noted, the tool of generations is attractive because they exist as a conceptual fact, have precise boundaries and are even demographically measurable, so we can say that there are so many millennials, so many boomers, etc. in Ecuador, but that explains nothing but age People. The same author insinuates that one of the reasons for the fascination of such a method is that it allows highlighting a specific group, the old, as an immobile and retarded sector, while the young would be the necessary vanguard of changes. But the fundamental flaw of the model lies in the key that classifies people into this or that generation: their date of birth. People are born every day, they don’t appear in separate groups every fifteen years. It is true that, as the philosopher Dilthey says, modern people are subject to common cultural and material influences, but they are subjectively assimilated, do not affect in the same way or are mechanically incorporated. All this leads us to the conclusion that the generation is too diffuse a mass to determine social analysis. (OR)