Daniel Noboa, the youngest elected president in the history of Ecuador

Businessman Daniel Noboa This Sunday he became the youngest elected president in the history of Ecuador and at 35 years old he will lead the Andean country for about 15 months, from next December to May 2025, when the mandate of conservative Guillermo Lasso was due to end.

The electronic voting record indicated that Noboa had a lead of 52.42% in front of 47.58% of the leftist lawyer Luisa González, with the 62.98% of the minutes counted.

Born on November 30, 1987, Noboa has won the Presidency in the second round, a possibility that his father, Álvaro Noboa, one of the richest people in the country thanks to his banana empire, tried five times without success.

Noboa reaches the Presidency after a brief political career, as he was an assembly member between 2021 and 2023 and from there he launched himself into the presidential race, he did not start as a favorite, but he played the role of “outsider”, he was seen as a new face in the politics and his performance in the electoral debate of the first round catapulted him to the runoff.

As an assemblyman, he was president of the Economic Development Commission and was criticized for having led the organization, in the middle of the war between Russia and Ukraine, of the trip – paid according to him by the private company – of six assemblymen to Russia, one of the main importers. of Ecuadorian bananas, together with the European Union (EU).

Noboa is the eldest of four brothers in a family of great businessmen and politicians, because in addition to his father’s presidential aspirations, his mother Annabella Azín, a medical doctor, was an assemblyman and candidate for the Vice Presidency.

He is also the grandson of Luis Noboa Naranjo, one of the most important businessmen in the country in the 20th century and one of the richest men in Ecuador in his time who introduced the Quaker oatmeal brand, with which he was humorously nicknamed his grandson during this electoral campaign.

No confrontations

In few words, calm and far from any type of confrontation, Noboa claims to be center-left, although he has more liberal economic approaches.

He is currently awaiting the birth of his second child from his marriage to his second wife, nutritionist and influencer Lavinia Valbonesi.

He had his first-born daughter with his first wife, Gabriela Goldbaum, with whom Noboa has faced problems in the divorce, to the point that he maintains a dispute with the Spanish insurance company Mapfre, since the woman allegedly had access to his bank details through an employee of this company.

Noboa studied Business Administration at the Stern School of Business at New York University and continued his career specializing in three master’s degrees: in 2019 in Business Administration and Public Administration at the Kellogg School of Management; in 2020 at Harvard University and in 2022 he completed his master’s degree in Political Communication and Governance at George Washington University.

At the age of 18, Noboa founded his first company “DNA Entertainment Group”, dedicated to the organization of events.

There he gained experience to, a few years later, work at his family’s Noboa Corporation; where he was the youngest shipping director in the company’s history. He was commercial director until June 2018 and his main task was to oversee the global sales strategy for all food products.

A music lover, Noboa does not believe “hyper specialization” is viable in current times, which is why he has also studied physics and marketing.

The new generation”

Noboa arrived at the elections as a candidate with new airs for the country, with a project that he claims is designed “to give freedom, peace and progress to Ecuador”, a project “for the future”, to “not return to the past”, in reference to Correismo, who governed Ecuador for a decade.

“The new Ecuador is possible. Ecuadorians no longer eat stories, it is a time for hope, a time for change, a time for a new Ecuador,” he said this Sunday in a message on his X account (formerly Twitter), in which he insisted that “without corruption and without overpricing In the works, the money is enough for the country.”

Noboa thanked his compatriots for believing in “the new generation” to jointly build a new country.