The political miracle achieved in 2021 by Guillermo Lasso, 67, vanished as soon as he settled in the Carondelet Palace. The comeback that he led to defeat the revolutionary candidate, Andrés Arauz, has entered the annals of continental political science, after the two previous defeats against Rafael Correa and Lenín Moreno, stigmatized for his past as a banker and for his role at the head of the Ministry of Economy before the dollarization of the country, despite the fact that in the end this is a success.
After losing the first electoral round two years ago and going to the ballot by only 0.35% of the ballots against the indigenous candidate, Yaku Pérez, Lasso emerged as if he were an Ecuadorian phoenix. A rejuvenated candidate thanks to his messages on Tik Tok, so seductive despite his low charisma, that he convinced the young people and tipped the balance in his favor with the support of 52.36% of the country.
The change, so longed for by Ecuadorian society, had finally arrived thanks to a politician who seemed to have the virtues of Joe Biden, an expert and veteran, a man of consensus to get the country out of a historic crisis caused by the pandemic and by the derives from the citizen revolution of Rafael Correa.
The conservative leader thus assumed presidential power, ready to transfer to executive management the successful formulas that made him a powerful banker despite his humble origins, the youngest of 11 siblings in a Guayaquil family. In a few months he managed to vaccinate citizens against Covid in one of the countries most impacted by the pandemic. The first success that for many of the observers is also the only one. Two years later, Lasso re-enters the Guinness Book of Politics by activating the death cross, dissolving Parliament and calling, through a CNE decision, elections in which he still does not know if he will run.
What has happened in these 24 months? The transcendental break with his Social Christian allies, the unscrupulous opposition siege, a management that had not just started due to his own mistakes and the wave of violence caused by drug trafficking, especially in coastal areas, have not given him a day of calm. Lasso, a calm man and close to his collaborators, did not find the right team, surrounded by managers without political reading and without the fang of his enemies.
In tough times, the physical weakness that Lasso showed in his appearances has not helped him either. The former banker drags a limp caused by medical malpractice that he suffered in a Spanish hospital after an accident on the Camino de Santiago. That “agility” that he demonstrated during the second round of elections thanks to his appearances on social networks, dressed in shoes and a red jacket and to the rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”, turned into an exasperating political slowness for a good part of the country.
Lasso has not been able to break the political corset that had pigeonholed him in the ideological right, without opening to different social groups and limited by his religious ideas, close to Opus Dei. Only with the arrival of Henry Cucalón, Minister of Government after the failure of the February referendum, did he get a weighty political operator at his side, although he has not been able to avoid the cross death either.
That successful motto of “I can’t impose my beliefs” also faded over the months. Only recently has he opted for a decisive turn in the fight against violence, with heavy-handed measures similar to those already implemented by the controversial Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Lasso has surrounded himself with the military, including the well-known general Paco Moncayo, to fight against drug trafficking mafias and eight local gangs, which they consider terrorists.
“I don’t give a damn about the polls,” said the president last year, an obvious sign that they were unfavorable to him, with popular support that did not reach 20%. There is not a single day of his presidency in which Lasso has not felt misunderstood by a large part of his country, once the grace period granted for vaccination has passed.
In the latest approval ranking among South American presidents, Lasso is in the middle of the pack, with 31% support, 16 points behind the leader (the Uruguayan Luis Lacalle, with 47%) and ahead of Nicolás Maduro (26 %), Alberto Fernández (22%) and the Peruvian Dina Boluarte (16%).
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
