At first glance, Rafael Correa and Daniel Noboa may seem very different. If we compare them in terms of ideology, personal career and political discourse, they have great differences. But if we compare them as a phenomenon, let’s say “correísmo” and “noboísmo”, and the political circumstances in which they exercised power, they have more similarities than they would like to acknowledge.
Before Rafael Correa sat in the presidential chair, the country had had four coups and seven presidents in ten years. It was 2006 and the young candidate represented “the new”. It was Correa who coined the phrase “out with everyone” and he never missed an opportunity to ridicule the actors of the party system. Like the video he used in his first electoral campaign, in which a man dressed in a dark suit and tie, was waiting for the elevator that had the phrase National Congress. When the door opened, two clowns were also in the elevator. Thus, the discontent of the citizens, that 70% who wanted democracy to function without politicians, was reflected in a twenty-second scene.
“Correa is the son of the ‘out with everyone’ movement, he managed to understand those codes and included them in his narrative, in his campaign strategy and in his audiovisual pieces,” explains political analyst Pedro Donoso. The former president exacerbated the rejection of the social community towards the political class. “That is why Correa dared to go to an election without a list of congressmen, which at that time could have been considered suicide,” he adds.
The context that has given rise to the Noboa phenomenon, although it occurs 17 years later, is similar to that of then. Guillermo Lasso decreed the cross death, a figure embedded in the Constitution to eliminate a Congress that had 95% rejection and end the period due to an institutional and credibility crisis similar to that of 2005. The elections were won by the young option, the one that disrupted the political board and that uses disruptive or creative methods, which have effects. “The new son is understanding the codes and using them to his advantage, without this meaning validating the methods, which maintains a discourse in which he says data that are not true, but the opposition does not understand how to win the narrative,” says Donoso.
Disruptive methods of governing and communication are another line that links the past and the present, Correism and Noboism, which was criticized then as well as now, because they do not fit the manual that politics dictates. Correa imposed disruptive methods to communicate what his government did. He implemented itinerant cabinets, an idea that he took from the communal government councils that former President Álvaro Uribe held in Colombia. In 10 years of government, Correa held 110 itinerant cabinets. He went with his ministers to meet in localities where no leader had ever gone before. But, in addition, he organized 523 citizen links, similar to those Hello President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, where he set the political and media agenda for the next seven days. “He created other forms of power. He did media criminology, he said who was good and who was bad, he passed sentences. And the opposition failed to understand that and that is why Correa was in power for 10 years,” adds the analyst.
Noboa uses other tools to communicate and takes advantage of social media. He can record a video where he counts push-ups for each scholarship he gives out and light up social media. Or he positions a coordinated message with his representatives in the Assembly and his ministers.
In 2006, Correa arrived as a outsider Naturally, he had no political connection with the institutions of that time. He was an orphan in the disputes that could arise. But his political operation managed to make the institutionality respond to his need, for example, to call for a popular consultation to call a Constituent Assembly. With this surgery he managed to have a majority in parliament, which was repeated in almost all of his periods, which was known as the ‘steamroller’, which approved all the bills sent by the Executive.
Noboa, under similar conditions, with only 12 legislators and without his own party, has achieved the same. He came to power in the middle of an inter-function war that, despite being independent from the Executive, affects him. “But all the institutions seem to be working for the president,” Donoso analyzes, and cites as an example the decision of the National Court of Justice that has included in the list of three candidates to preside over the Judicial Council a coordinator of the president’s political party. “The Attorney General’s Office also works for Noboa, in the case of the vice president,” he adds. The president has managed in eight months to break this orphanhood in the Government, and can attribute to himself the increase in popularity after his decisions to militarize the country, after the takeover of a television channel, on January 9.
Both presidents have managed to take advantage of a crisis of representation, not only in partisan politics, but also in the union, trade and academic spheres. And they have identified their enemies to generate cohesion among their electorate. Correa chose the party system, the United States, the IMF and the media. Noboa continues to identify all his enemies. He has marked Correismo on his list, there is also Mexico replacing the United States, and everything that does not represent the “new Ecuador,” the phrase he has coined to win reelection. The phenomena of Noboa and Correa, in different times, have taken advantage of the circumstances and strategies to build their presidencies.
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