Incumbent President of Ecuador Daniel Noboa narrowly defeated establishment socialist candidate Luisa González on Sunday in the first round of the nation’s 2025 presidential elections.
Both candidates, who faced each other in 2023, will once again compete in a runoff election scheduled for Sunday, April 13, as neither obtained the required votes to be elected in the first round.
Sunday saw over ten million Ecuadorians head to the polls and cast their votes to elect the president, vice president, and members of the National Assembly.
At press time, voter results published by Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE) indicate that, with 92 percent of the vote counted, Noboa obtained 44.31 percent of the votes and González obtained 43.83 percent. While voting in Ecuador is compulsory, voter turnout was estimated at roughly 82.27 percent.
The presidential ballot featured 16 candidates from across the political spectrum. Noboa, a 37-year-old outsider and Ecuador’s youngest president ever, once again ran under the banner of his National Democratic Action (ADN) party, a political organization that describes itself as “center-left” in the party’s formal campaign proposal document. Noboa, however, has aligned himself geopolitically with leaders such as President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and American President Donald Trump. Noboa attended Trump’s inauguration in January.
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González, a 47-year-old lawyer and a protegé of socialist former president and fugitive convicted felon Rafael Correa, represented Citizen Revolution, a socialist party led by Correa, who lives in Belgium and is avoiding an eight-year in absentia prison sentence on corruption charges he received in 2020.
The election was Ecuador’s first since the October 2023 snap election, where current President Noboa defeated Luisa González. While González won the first round of the 2023 snap election, she ultimately lost to Noboa in the runoff.
The 2023 snap election was the result of conservative former President Guillermo Lasso invoking an obscure “mutually assured destruction” constitutional clause that year that dissolved both the executive and legislative branches. Lasso invoked the constitutional clause in response to leftist lawmakers launching 14 different impeachment processes against him between 2021 and 2023, which made it impossible for him to govern. Both Noboa and the now-outgoing Congress were elected in 2023 to serve the remainder of that four-year constitutional term through May 2025.
The electoral event also yielded narrow results in Congress, resulting in a new near-bipartisan parliamentary composition between ADN and Citizen Revolution but with neither party securing a majority of the 151 seats.
As of Monday morning, ADN reportedly obtained 66 of the Congress’ 151 seats while Citizen Revolution obtained 64. Pachakutik, a leftist indigenous party, obtained eight seats, while the conservative Social Christian Party obtained four, and smaller parties won the remaining seats. The anti-corruption Construye Movement party, whose 2023 presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated, obtained one seat.
Noboa – who, according to exit polls, appeared on track to win the 50 percent of the votes required to be elected in the first round, suspended a post-election campaign event that his party had scheduled at a hotel in the capital city of Quito on Sunday night in light of the narrow results. On Monday morning, the incumbent president published a message on social media thanking his followers for winning against Ecuador’s mainstream parties in the first round.
Gracias, Ecuador.
— Daniel Noboa Azin (@DanielNoboaOk) February 10, 2025
Gracias por la esperanza y el coraje de volver a creer que este país puede ser diferente. Ahora, a seguir luchando. pic.twitter.com/GlbpcxsHFM
“It has been a year of tireless struggle for the soul of this country. Yesterday we achieved what has not been seen in years: we won the first round against all the parties of Old Ecuador,” Noboa’s message read. “We won and took the most important step of all: to consolidate a different Assembly, becoming the first force, able to work for you and not to focus their efforts on persecuting or weakening us to obtain immunity.”
“Now, as has been the custom of this government: we will fight as on the first day, so that your dream of a just country and development will be fulfilled. Together, stronger and more determined than ever to consolidate the New Ecuador,” he continued.
González addressed her followers on Sunday evening after the first results were published and asserted that she feels confident she will win the runoff. The socialist candidate, without presenting evidence to substantiate her claims, also accused Noboa of allegedly using “more than 100 million dollars” of public resources in the campaign that went unreported to the nation’s electoral authorities, who maintain a strict $5.4 million spending cap on each campaign.
“Because I belong to a country that cares about me, that is the country that we are going to build with you, because we are going to win and we are going to govern for 18 million Ecuadorians. Until victory always, comrades,” González told her followers.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
