the correista Luisa Gonzalez and the businessman Daniel Noboa will dispute the Ecuadorian Presidency in a second round on October 15, after being the two candidates with the most votes in this Sunday’s elections, elections marked by the assassination of candidate Fernando Villavicenciowhose substitute, Christian Zuritahas been in third place.

Although the polls already predicted that González would be the most voted in the first round, Noboa was not in the pools and his support has had a meteoric rise in recent days, driven by the youth vote and his image as an ‘outsider’.

González, a lawyer and former assembly member who held various positions within the administration of former President Rafael Correa, has stressed to her followers that she will be the first woman to contest the second round of some presidential elections in Ecuador. “We call for the unity of all Ecuadorians,” said González, who followed the results from Quito accompanied by former Spanish vice president Pablo Iglesias.

For the candidate of the Citizen Revolution, the assassination of Villavicencio, Correa’s staunch enemy due to the corruption allegations he made against him throughout his journalistic career, harmed his candidacy and prevented him from achieving victory in the first round.

For his part, Noboa, 35, the son of magnate and five-time presidential candidate Álvaro Noboa, became the election night surprise by placing second and going to the second round, where he will once again face correísmo, as his father did in 2007 against Correa.

The ADN political alliance candidate began to gain momentum after the presidential debate, overtaking other more familiar faces such as former vice president Otto Sonnenholzner, environmental politician Yaku Pérez and former legionnaire and security specialist Jan Topic. “It will not be the first time that a new project turns the ‘establishment’ around political. That freshness in doing politics is what has brought us here,” he assured the press.

Although in statements to Efe last July he defined himself as center leftNoboa comes from business circle of Guayaquil, one of the great economic engines of Ecuador, while González has his roots in rural area from the coastal province of Manabí, an origin of which she is always proud.

Whoever wins the elections in October will succeed the current president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, to complete his 2021-2025 term, interrupted by the head of state in May by invoking the constitutional mechanism of “cross death”, with which he dissolved the Assembly Nacional and forced this extraordinary electoral process.

In third place in the scrutiny, far from being able to get Noboa out of the ballot, is the candidacy of the assassinated Villavicencio, riddled with bullets by alleged Colombian hitmen on August 9 as he left a political rally in Quito. Villavicencio’s votes will fall on Zurita, to whom the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures on Sunday after denouncing that he has received death threats similar to those received by his colleague days before his murder.