Winning democratic stability implies conquering it day by day”, said Jaime Roldós before boarding the presidential plane that crashed into the Huairapungo hill.
Death interrupted the first democratic mandate after a long dictatorship. To the other leaders who did not fulfill their mandates, it was the political turmoil that affects the democratic stability of Ecuador that interrupted their governments.
Abdalá Bucaram did much to justify the declaration of “mental incapacity” that removed him from the presidency. Jamil Mahuad was overthrown in a military coup shortly after dollarizing the economy, and Lucio Gutiérrez was overthrown by protests against corruption and nepotism by his government.
In the case of Guillermo Lasso, who will leave the government more than a year before completing his term, his mismanagement was compounded by the suspicious decision to allow the renewal of a murky contract left by the previous government. And the consequence of the failure of this conservative president is that Rafael Correa will be able to try again to have a president that he can manage from Brussels and solve his problems with the Justice system, no matter what.
This will be his third attempt after two failures. Lenin Moreno jumped to the opposite side as soon as he became president and did nothing to prevent the cases that ended in a conviction for Correa and imprisonment for former vice president Jorge Glas from advancing.
In the next election, he crowned his former minister Andrés Arauz as candidate, but lost to Guillermo Lasso, a conservative banker and former dollarizing minister in the Mahuad government. Ergo, a perfect rival for Correa’s populism.
Even as his political enemy, there are reasons to suspect that Correa allowed Lasso to escape impeachment removal, facilitating a less dishonorable exit. The application of article 148 of the Constitution dissolves the National Assembly but also determines the end of its own government through early general elections. That is why they call this clause “cross death” for which Lasso has just resigned almost two years of his mandate, in exchange for avoiding dismissal and occupying the Carondelet Palace for another six months.
The political trial under accusation of embezzlement had already begun, when the president applied article 148. Immediately, the Pachakutik indigenous movement and the Christian Social Party led by Jaime Nebot denounced the unconstitutionality of the measure and demanded that the constitutional court invalidate it. But the majority bench, which answers to Rafael Correa, was slow to react.
The leftist leader described as unconstitutional what Lasso did when it was too late. Because? Probably because if the current president is dismissed in impeachment, the presidency is assumed by Vice President Alfredo Borrero and governs until the end of the term, which would be in May 2025. On the other hand, if there is a cross death, in a couple of months there will be elections legislative and presidential to choose the authorities that will fulfill the interrupted mandates.
The correista victory in the local elections in February and what the polls are indicating show that in the elections to be held in August, Correa’s candidates will win, while, in such a seismic electoral scenario, no one can be sure what will It will happen in the 2025 elections.
If Correa can put in a president now, why would he wait until 2025. Although that year whoever governs will have to face new elections, in the year and a half that a Correista president with a legislative majority will govern, he could use many means, constitutional or not. to solve his mentor’s problems with the Ecuadorian Justice.
Helping Guillermo Lasso to have a less embarrassing start brings that possibility closer to almost two years.
Perhaps that is why Correa said, after several days, what he should have said from the beginning: that the dissolution of congress is unconstitutional because the grounds established in the Constitution did not occur.
The Social Christians and Pachakutik immediately said what it took for Correa to say. The magna carta that he promulgated in 2008 establishes as grounds for the country to go through a “serious political crisis or internal commotion.” And what was happening in Ecuador was a political trial, a process that cannot be compared
Pachakutik and the PSC demanded the dismissal of Lasso for the same reason that Pedro Castillo was dismissed in Peru after his attempt to dissolve Congress without complying with the grounds established in article 134 of the Constitution, which are two consecutive censures of councils of ministers proposed by the president.
If in Ecuador the president was able to leave power through the door before the opposition throws him out the window, it is because Rafael Correa allowed it.
Why did the refugee leader in Belgium, intensely hating the conservative banker who came to the presidency representing financial power, allow him a decent exit when he had the legislative votes to destroy him politically?: because he preferred to ensure victory in early general elections, in instead of the total destruction of a political enemy at the price of having the next election only in 2025.
And why did Lasso choose to benefit Correa electorally, cutting the mandate of his party that Vice President Alfredo Borrero could fulfill by almost two years? Just to make his fall a little slower and less dishonorable?
One possible answer is that Lasso’s right and Correa’s left have something in common that puts them on the same path, facing Pachakutik: extractivism.
In the first scrutiny of the election that made Lasso president, who appeared in second place, therefore disputing the ballotage, was Yaku Pérez, from Pachakutik. This movement is the political arm of the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador which, like most indigenous organizations in the world, is a natural defender of the environment and opposes economies based on the extraction of hydrocarbons, minerals and other types of commodities whose large-scale exploitation generates enclave economies.
Perhaps that is why the counts put Lasso in second place, who was the one who finally played the second round with Andrés Arauz. Without Pachakutik in the ballotage, from the right or the left, the presidency would remain in the hands of a defender of the extractivist economy.
