Regardless of the winners and losers, politicians, authorities and voters must learn from the road leading up to Sunday’s elections. First, no one is aware that the rocky road, full of potholes and pitfalls, began with that provision about “crucified death”, without any logic embedded in the Constitution. The possibility of terminating the mandate of the executive and legislature is typical of parliamentary regimes, where the functions of head of state and head of government are separated and therefore held by two different persons. Furthermore, the head of the Government is born from the parliamentary majority, and not by the direct vote of the voters, which conditions the duration of his mandate by preserving that majority. Finally, when Parliament is dissolved and elections are postponed, they are held for a new term, not to complete the one that was in progress, so as not to introduce an element of instability as we have now with a Government that will barely have 18 months to run. management (and it could be only six months if the president dissolves the Assembly on the last day of his third year in office). Therefore, the first lesson is the urgent reform of the Constitution at least in this matter.

The CNE declares Daniel Noboa the new president of Ecuador

Ecuador, wary of political action

Second, it is obvious that the wrongly named “political parties” were the first to be surprised by the announcement of elections. No organization with a letterhead certified by the National Electoral Council (CNE) had the necessary conditions to face this challenge. They didn’t have formed political cadres that could run, they didn’t have an adequate campaign organization, they didn’t even have a clear ideology. Thus, we are witnessing a political market of supply and demand, where memoranda are looking for candidates, and candidates are looking for memoranda. Even in one or two cases when the candidates left the organization, they were people with practically no political experience and no suitable conditions for the position they were looking for. So, the second lesson is the need for deep reform of party and election laws.

Third, the HNS is again responsible for sowing doubts in the electoral process. The agility in delivering election results overshadowed the absence of prior control, especially in the pre-election campaign phase, and the illegal and absurd decision to repeat voting abroad. He did this after the results were announced, so any change that occurs in Sunday’s vote will lead to a confrontation that is very difficult to resolve and will contribute to further damage to the tarnished image of that institution. All this leads to the third lesson, which is, on the one hand, the urgent renewal of members (somewhat cumbersome due to the legal entanglement), and on the other hand, the need to reform the laws that determine its formation and management.

Finally, the most difficult lesson to understand and accept is the role of citizenship. We have a responsibility to abandon TikTok and social networks as the main source of (dis)information and assume the status of the fundamental core of democracy. (OR)