Daniel Noboa, the young millionaire candidate who is aiming for the presidency in Ecuador

Daniel Noboawho unexpectedly entered the presidential second round with 23.4% of the votes. Ecuador behind Correista candidate Luisa González (33.61%), he is now the favorite in the polls to win at the polls on Sunday. He is a millionaire candidate who projects himself as the prototype of success and tries to shake off the policy traditional.

The winner of the runoff will govern the Andean nation from December until May 24, 2025, when President Guillermo Lasso was due to end his term.

35 years old and eldest son of the magnate and five-time presidential candidate Álvaro Noboa and the doctor and former legislator Annabella Azín, Daniel Noboa inherited not only a business legacy but also a taste for politics, although he avoids pigeonholing himself into any ideological current.

“Defending freedoms is defending freedom of enterprise, freedom of choice, freedom of the press; We have to create a government that has international openness, that knows how to generate employment and give security to people, that is ‘pronoboism’”declared the candidate.

Although “he has tried not to present his line of political direction head-on”Daniel Noboa represents “continuity with the dynamics of the private sectors”said the professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Franklin Ramírez, to The Associated Press.

He said that the construction of his figure does not come from a political structure, but rather “he is the candidate of the family, of the corporation, of the company that does not have a party behind it.”

With a slow and non-confrontational tone of voice, Noboa entered the second electoral round in a phenomenon that neither the pollsters nor his rivals anticipated. He assures that the “female and young votes pushed our candidacy forward.” If he wins on Sunday, Noboa will end Guillermo Lasso’s term and would become the youngest president in the history of Ecuador.

The female presence in its campaign is relevant and focuses on three figures, who according to experts strengthen the message of social service and family unity that it strives to project.

One of them is her mother, who has been key as she was in her husband’s campaigns. Wearing a white apron and stethoscope, the 62-year-old medical doctor travels the country and actively promotes her son’s candidacy in caravans, meetings, and public and private events.

“Since he was little, Daniel accompanied us to our medical brigades, helping in one way or another, organizing shifts, carrying boxes of medicines”says the mother proudly on the Tik Tok social network.

The beauty and youth of his wife, the Ecuadorian influencer and nutritionist Lavinia Valbonesi, 25, is also a constant in his campaign. With her, he posts romantic, fun, family, altruistic and even paternal moments on Tik Tok, because it was precisely on that network where they made Lavinia’s new ongoing pregnancy public.

In the family environment that he constantly exposes on networks, there is no missing his aunt Isabel Noboa, owner of Nobis, one of the most important business conglomerates in Ecuador and who manages three social benefit foundations. She also became active to promote it. ““I believe in you, Daniel.”Told him.

For the analyst, Azín—Noboa’s mother—is the connector that keeps the presence alive “spectral” of his father, who does not appear in the electoral campaign. While her aunt, who, she remembers, has a historical dispute with her brother, would pretend to be a sign of overcoming conflicts. His wife, however, “exhibits its fashion performance and current topics” that connects him with the young electorate, but also with the conservative one.

In Noboa’s electoral campaign, another facet prevails: that of the athlete running or in the gym lifting weights or that of the musician sharing playlists, singing and playing songs by Maná, Juan Gabriel and even Metallica on the electric guitar. He also frequently appears with his one-year-old son Álvaro and four-year-old Luisa. She is the daughter of his first marriage, which has not been free of controversy surrounding infidelities and legal disputes.

Even the friendship with UFC fighter, Marlon “Chito” Vera, came to light in the electoral campaign. Daniel “He helped me when I needed it most”Vera said publicly in reference to financial support and to obtain financing for her career.

“He likes to exhibit an archetype of a family man, but not from just any family, but from a successful family”, explained Ramírez. His campaign is inscribed both in the logic of “technopolitics” What’s important in social networks to display things? “very light”as in the “post-politics”, that is to say, “do not talk about politics, do not enter into conflict, present yourself outside of politicking and partisanship,” analyzed.

But one detail, according to Ramírez, escaped Noboa Jr. in that escape from traditional politics and it is the same one that his father executed: a “clientele device” for the delivery of gifts.

This is how the campaign of the Noboa emporium dolphin goes, who wears a bulletproof vest and when necessary moves around in his own helicopter. He promises to reach the presidential chair to apply the Phoenix plan, unify an intelligence center, provide supplies and high technology to the police and militarize prisons, ports and roads to neutralize the violence prevailing in the country.

“We will take charge of freeing our neighborhoods and cities from crime“Noboa also promised on Tik Tok.

With a degree in business administration and another in public administration from Harvard University, Daniel Noboa began his political career as a legislator in 2021, but at 18 he founded his own company and then worked in his father’s corporation, who is the richest man in Ecuador with an estimated fortune of US$910 million and an empire of 128 companies in more than 50 countries.

Paradoxically, the Noboa Group, which belongs to the candidate’s father, has pending tax payments of some US$ 88.46 million as of Monday, and US$ 880.47 million of debt in dispute, an administrative procedure that allows differences to be aired. between taxpayers and the tax agency. The candidate and his companies do not register outstanding debts with the tax body.

This has resulted in a thorn in the side of Daniel Noboa’s campaign, when in an awkward moment during a meeting with students from the International University at the end of September, a young man asked him how he would face tax evasion, including that of the conglomerate. of his dad.

“Evasion is a crime and what you are saying is that it is a group that is actively committing a crime, which is not proven, so I recommend that you handle the forms in that sense”answered.

Source: AP