election

The democratic elections of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador have enraged the oligarchs, particularly the wealthiest bankers who ruled and predated on the nation for so many decades. That predation led to a massive banking crisis led by fraudulent elite bankers. Ecuadorians fled the nation in record numbers. Ecuador suffered the highest percentage of emigration in Latin America. Political crises became the norm, with a series of presidents forced to resign within months. Correa and his reform party, Alianza PAIS (AP), changed all this.

Correa has served his full elected terms of office largely because he met his campaign promises to more than double expenditures on education, health, and infrastructure that have transformed Ecuador and substantially reduced poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Ecuador's democracy is real. When rival parties won elections in a number of Ecuador's largest cities, there was a normal, peaceful transition of power to those parties. Ecuador has several major political parties and employs a common democratic means of determining whether the first round of the election results produce such a dominant winner that no run-off election is required. Despite the fact that Mr. Moreno, the AP candidate for the presidency, came within a razor-thin margin of reaching that decisive plurality in the first round, the government required a run-off election in accordance with the law.