The indigenous leader Yaku Pérez, last year in the Quimsacocha páramo in Ecuador.
Less than five tenths of a difference tilted the balance of Ecuador's elections on Monday night towards a result that no one had predicted: the presidency of the country will be disputed, if these data are confirmed, between the left of Correísmo and the indigenous movement in Second round.
The polls prior to the presidential elections which predicted that it would take two calls to the polls to have a name, but placed Andrés Arauz, sponsored by former President Rafael Correa, in the April runoff, and Guillermo Lasso, the conservative politician who attended for the third time.
The almost nine million Ecuadorians who went to vote were surprising.
The wide indecision that the polls had been reflecting for weeks was transformed into that very narrow percentage margin that, for the moment, places Yaku Pérez, indigenous leader of the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement, in the second round.
There are less than a thousand electoral records to be counted out of a universe of 39,135, but until 100% of the scrutiny has been completed, neither Lasso nor Pérez are guaranteed the second round.
Arauz, yes, with 32.1% of the votes, which serve as a guarantee of electoral victory but without sufficient advantage to avoid a tiebreaker.
The advance in the ballot count, however, has constantly maintained that small difference between the two seconds, always leaving the leader of the indigenous movement up.
And that has made everyone nervous.
Yaku Pérez himself distrusted from the electoral dawn that the recount process could be altered in the shadows and warned with being vigilant of the National Electoral Council.
"They are plotting a fraud between Mr. Correa and Mr. Lasso," declared the indigenous leader on Monday, seeing that Pachakutik's figures collected in the Assembly give him a greater advantage than those of the Presidency.
Lasso, who has invested a millionaire sum in what he hoped would be his third and final attempt to reach the Carondelet Palace, came out disappointed, disheveled and without a tie, to simply say that we must wait for the scrutiny to completely conclude.
And Rafael Correa, who already knows what it is to beat the CREO candidate in an election, has written from Belgium on social networks an unexpected message endorsing the second position of the banker so harshly criticized in his government, compared to the indigenous representative.
“On the coast, Lasso far surpasses Yaku (Pérez).
Arauz will rise to around 32.7%;
Yaku (Pérez) will drop to about 19.49%;
and Lasso will rise to about 19.73%.
The final will be Arauz - Lasso ”.
The candidacy of Unión por la Esperanza (Unes), new acronym for the followers of Correismo, is not interested in measuring itself in a second round with Pachakutik's left because Yaku Pérez, unlike Lasso and Arauz, does not generate that rejection in the sympathizers of his rivals.
It could absorb the support of those who were left out of the first round and opposed the return of Rafael Correa's forms of government, embodied in his dolphin.
The fragmentation of the vote - voters could choose between 16 candidates - and the map of the results of the first round therefore leave several lessons.
In the first place, correísmo maintains its momentum after four years of the Lenín Moreno government.
The outgoing president won the elections in 2017 as Correa's candidate, although upon assuming power he distanced himself from his mentor until he broke with him and gave rise to a fierce dispute that has marked the last term.
Second, opposition to Correísmo has manifested itself through different avenues.
The option of the traditional right represented by Lasso has proven insufficient.
The alternatives that citizens seek have been, in some way, new profiles that encompass values such as environmentalism or democratic regeneration, championed, respectively, by Pérez and the premiere politician, Xavier Hervas, of the Democratic Left.
More than 13 million Ecuadorians were called to the polls to decide Moreno's successor.
The elections, however, initially had a key more linked to the past than to the future.
The vote supposed a substantive decision on the chapter in the history of the Andean country opened by former President Correa and the battle to reach the Carondelet Palace was limited in practice to two antagonistic tendencies: the return of Correismo in the face of the option of change .
Finally, the voice of the Ecuadorians consolidated the weight that the left still has in the country without it necessarily having to be carried out exclusively by Correísmo.
Between Arauz, Yaku Pérez and Xavier Hervas, this ideological current touches 70% of citizen support.
Although they become opposition.