In a change of pace, Ecuador’s runoff presidential election brought conservative businessman Guillermo Lasso to office. But the country’s election also offers some lessons about broader trends in Latin American politics.
The surprise victory of Guillermo Lasso, a conservative businessman, over the left-wing economist Andrés Arauz in Ecuador’s presidential election marks a remarkable turnaround by a candidate who nearly failed to make it into the runoff, obtaining merely 32,000 votes more than the third-place candidate, Yaku Pérez Guartambel. The result points to five major takeaways.
First, Lasso’s triumph shows that Latin America continues to be ideologically fragmented. After a decade-long continental reign of center-left, commodity-boosted governments—symbolized by former presidents such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Argentina), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (Honduras), and Rafael Correa (Ecuador)—the arrival of a more adverse macroeconomic environment in the early 2010s contributed to the rise of center-right leaders such as former presidents Maurício Macri (Argentina), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (Peru), and Michel Temer (Brazil) and current President Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou (Uruguay), as well as growing resistance to remaining left-wing leaders in Bolivia and Venezuela. Yet victories by President Andrés…
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