Ecuadorian youth are ‘disconnected’ from the political process and favor new, younger faces

By Liam Higgins

Younger Ecuadorian voters are paying little attention to the upcoming political campaign, says University of Guayaquil political science professor Fernando Manzano. “As a group, young people are more disconnected than I’ve ever seen them,” he said. “They don’t see anything in the current political process that really affects them.”

Could presidential candidate Jan Topic benefit from Ecuador’s youth vote in the February election?

In a recent interview, Manzano cited two polls showing 75% to 80% of voters aged 18 to 25 have “almost no idea” who they will support for president or National Assembly in the February election. “This indecision — or apathy — could be crucial in the next election, as it was in the last one, because of the law that requires all Ecuadorians to vote,” he says. “If this was not a requirement, I would guess most of them would not vote.”

Manzano says the youth vote was the biggest factor in last year’s election of Daniel Noboa. “He came out of nowhere after the assassination [of Fernando Villavicencio] and I think younger voters were mostly responsible for this,” Manzano says. “They saw a young, unknown face in the crowd, and they chose it. Many of them had seen Noboa’s online campaign and liked the message of youth and newness even though they didn’t know exactly where he stood on the issues. The other candidates miscalculated and underestimated the power of social media.”

Most youth have relatively little ideological interest, Manzano says. “In general, they may be a little left of center, but they don’t identify with any leftist party,” says. “They have no interest in the ongoing conflict between the Correistas and the political movements opposing the Correistas,” he said. “For most of them, Rafael Correa is yesterday’s news and the debate that rages in the National Assembly and among the political class about him and his followers seems meaningless.”

He added that he asked several of his students what they thought of the controversy over Attorney General Diana Salazar’s impeachment trial, and only one out of eight said he paid any attention to it.

When asked by a radio interviewer who he thinks young people will support for president in February, he said based on their desire for “new, younger faces,” Jan Topic could be at the top of the list. “Noboa still has some appeal, but since the last election he’s become part of the establishment and part of the problem in the eyes of many young voters. Noboa has been called the ‘accidental president’ and I don’t rule out another accident in February.”