Guillermo Lasso’s weak leadership
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso’s already weak leadership has been eroded even further by recent nationwide protests led by indigenous groups. It seems inevitable Lasso will change course from his free-market agenda.
The conservative free-marketeer Guillermo Lasso was sworn in as the president of Ecuador in May 2021. The best moment of Lasso’s presidency was the COVID-19 vaccination campaign when the president delivered on his promise to vaccinate the population in 100 days.
Despite the initial success, Lasso has been a weak president from the beginning. His CREO party won only 13 of 137 seats in the National Assembly. Lasso won the presidential run-off mostly due to the widespread popular rejection of his opponent, a protegé of former socialist president Rafael Correa, who left the country due to corruption charges. That is to say, Lasso’s sound fiscal policies have never had broad support among the population and the general perception has been that his administration failed to reflect voters’ demands. As a sign of political weakness, the president failed to pass key economic reforms in the legislature during the first year of his tenure.
In the past month, a network of indigenous organizations led a nationwide general strike. Before and during the protests, President Lasso made a series of mistakes. The outcome is that Lasso’s ability to push forward his agenda is even more limited.
The strike, which lasted for 18 days and left 9 dead, blocked economic activity in much of the country and only came to an end thanks to mediation from the Catholic church. Lasso has already made several concessions in subsequent talks with CONAIE, the indigenous group which led the protests. These concessions include the reduction of small farmers’ debts with state-run financial institutions — a measure that runs counter to Lasso’s pledge to be fiscally conservative. Moreover, further concessions appear likely given that fuel subsidies, one of CONAIE’s key demands, remains unresolved.
On fuel prices, public spending, and other requests, such as a change to mining policy, Lasso has committed to changing course. He sacked his finance minister; the new appointee Pablo Arosemena said he would alter previous policy priorities by increasing social spending and spurring growth via public works — two constant demands of Lasso’s critics.
These concessions do not reflect well on the president’s leadership. One error Lasso made even before the protests began was his failure to understand public sentiment toward the government and a miscalculation of his administration’s ability to deal with CONAIE. Moreover, if the government has money to raise social spending and promote public works now, why did it not acknowledge this three weeks ago? The contradiction leaves Lasso in a weaker position.
Once demonstrations started, Lasso and members of his cabinet claimed that the national strike was financed by narcotraffickers — a move designed to delegitimize the protesters. This eventually made Lasso’s decision to sit down to negotiate with them look confusing.
In addition, Lasso’s government made a decision amid the crisis that soon proved to be a misstep: the arrest of the country’s most prominent indigenous leader, Leonidas Iza, on unspecified charges. Iza was released after 24 hours amid public outcry, and the protests only grew bigger. In an interview, political scientist Lenin Miranda of the Universidad Central de Ecuador told me that Iza’s arrest mobilized indigenous activists who did not closely identify with him beforehand. This was because they perceived his arrest as an abuse of power by the government.
Through the lens of realpolitik, if you don’t have enough control over the state apparatus to jail your opponents (as Nicolás Maduro has in Venezuela or Vladimir Putin in Russia), it is extremely risky to try this option. The move failed for Lasso, and his adversary has now portrayed himself as the victim.
For his part, Iza’s narrative was that he, a popular leader from a historically oppressed segment of the population, was sent to jail by the government of the elites. The narrative worked well for him, as seen by the crowd of poor Ecuadorians who celebrated him in the working-class part of Quito after the strike’s end was announced.
Conversely, in the wealthier districts of the capital, protesters chanted slogans against Iza and called for security forces to take a harder line against the indigenous movement. It is worth noting that the national flag was overwhelmingly used by government supporters — in a similar fashion to other right-wing protests in Latin America, such as in Brazil, Argentina and Peru.
Lasso emerges from the crisis with only 35% of Ecuadorians saying they trust him, according to the polling firm CEDATOS.
His weakness can also be seen via defections by other right-wing politicians. Within the country’s political right, the leader of the Social Christian Party, Jaime Nebot, Lasso’s former ally, called for greater regional autonomy for his birth city of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s wealthiest city. It is nearly impossible that Nebot’s proposal will succeed. However, Nebot taking advantage of a moment of crisis to push his own agenda is another sign of Lasso’s lack of leadership.
If Lasso is to remain in office, his communication with the public must improve and parts of the government’s free-market agenda may need to be scrapped. In a CEDATOS poll asking people to identify the leading reason for the protests, 52% listed either lack of jobs or high gas prices. Lasso must be able to frame himself as a leader who understands these problems. This may entail further government spending. However, he should also seize control of the narrative by pointing to areas where CONAIE’s leadership has been lacking. A survey by the Universidad Central de Ecuador found that 80% of indigenous children it cared for during the protests had malnutrition, yet addressing child malnutrition was not among the group’s 10 demands to put an end to the general strike. Given Lasso’s weak leadership, the prospect of a free-market reformist agenda is now close to zero. For the foreseeable future, the baseline scenario is for a lame duck Lasso presidency, that appeases the indigenous opposition and is unable to advance its own political agenda.
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