Latin American voters tend to reject ruling parties and politicians. What did Ecuador’s president do differently?
By Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, and Margot Treadwell, a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Center-right incumbent Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s presidential runoff election on Sunday, defeating Luisa González by more than 10 points. Noboa, the 37-year-old son of a banana magnate, earned 55.6 percent of the vote to González’s 44.4 percent. González alleged electoral fraud and said that she would request a recount, but a growing number of opposition figures have acknowledged her defeat.
Noboa’s reelection is not surprising at first glance. After all, campaign wisdom holds that an incumbent candidate often has significant advantages, including name recognition, experience, and the ability to enact policy during a campaign.
Yet incumbents have lost most recent national elections in Latin America. Incumbent candidates have lost in 22 of the 27 free and fair presidential elections held in the region since 2018, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. This trend was also visible on a global scale in 2024, when incumbent parties lost vote shares in the overwhelming majority of national elections.
Latin Americans have long used the so-called voto castigo, or punishment vote, to express frustration with the status quo and reject governing parties, irrespective of their ideological orientation. Although anti-incumbent sentiment can reflect a healthy democratic demand for accountability, the continuous rejection of governing parties may also highlight deeper discontent—which risks undermining public support for democratic governance.
Latin America’s anti-incumbency trend predates the COVID-19 pandemic. It has often been linked to dissatisfaction with public services, such as security, health care, and education; outrage with corruption scandals; and, perhaps most importantly, low economic growth.
In fact, research suggests that presidential popularity in Latin America—and leaders’ prospects of reelection—depend on factors that governments cannot control, such as global commodity prices and international interest rates. This helps…
