Almost no one paid attention to him when the presidential campaign began in July. Daniel Noboa was semi-unknown inside and outside Ecuador, but he had an initial advantage, his last name. Because there is not a single Ecuadorian who does not know his father, the banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, a five-time presidential candidate and one of the richest men in the country.. From the Pacific to the Amazon, passing through the volcanoes of the Andes.
At only 35 years old, Noboa landed in the early elections almost in the dark, forgotten by the media and the public, at the head of National Democratic Action (ADN), an alliance created by himself with an obvious nod to his father with that DNA of his initials.. Two years earlier he entered the National Assembly with the support of the Socialist Party, the same party that on other occasions accompanied his father in his failed presidential attempts.
Many memes have spread since then on the networks demanding paternity tests due to the great differences between the torrential Álvaro, famous for his phrase “Ser created a mess!” and the restrained Daniel, who has made the most of his academic training to consolidate his campaign towards the Carondelet Palace.
His mother, the doctor Annabella Azín, whose brigades of the New Humanity Crusade Foundation have treated thousands of patients from the most disadvantaged sectors, says that Daniel seems like a young old man, always so responsible, since he was 16 years old as a yard supervisor. From containers. But the reality is that he enjoyed the good life and music, capable of imitating any singer.. Until his father gave him an ultimatum: to study.
Political master's degrees at George Washington University and Harvard, business administration at Stern in New York, and management at the Kellogg School have finally enabled him to become an outsider in the campaign with which Correism wanted to regain power.. And really without Noboa, Rafael Correa would already be packing his bags to return to his country through the front door.
Everything changed when in August Colombian hitmen ended the life of anti-corruption journalist Fernando Villavicencio in Quito, an assassination that hit the country so hard that its citizens turned on their televisions en masse days later to witness the only debate between candidates in the first round.. And Noboa arrived at the television studio with the bulletproof vest that made him famous.. According to what he himself confessed to EL MUNDO, it was a decision he made hours before because “we had to remind people that there is a candidate here who is not here because he was murdered.”. “It was a clear message of protest and the emergency situation in which we live.”
Noboa, an attractive young man, then attracted all eyes in the debate. His intellectual solvency did the rest. In the blink of an eye it went from 2% support to more than 20% in the face of a country that was licking its wounds and looking for urgent solutions. His electoral strategy from day one, employment for young people plus the fight against drug trafficking, did the rest.
A transcendental part of the comeback in both rounds has been played by his wife, the fitness influencer Lavinia Valbonesi, who knew how to multiply the successes of her husband's campaign on social networks, especially on TikTok. 50% of voters in Ecuador are very young, habitual consumers of short videos on the Chinese network. They all wanted something new, an outsider far from the old politics riddled with corruption.
The muscle of the Citizen Revolution in the second round closed the gap, it seemed that the process was taking a long time for Noboa. And when the Correísta González rebounded the most, came the second blow of the centrist leader, who defines himself as a “moderate social democrat.”. Half a million life-size cardboard Noboas took to the streets because the candidate had run out of money for the campaign, but they had a cardboard factory that quickly carried out the order.
Lavinia, his wife, took on the challenge: “I already found out that my husband is being robbed all over the country”. And then, as Álvaro Noboa would surely say, the chaos broke out again.. The cartoon of Noboa sitting at a family's table, in the bed of some young girls, in the hairdresser's, in the church…. Popular ingenuity took him to a massage house to receive therapeutic treatment. In a single stroke, the electoral magician had added social media users as a fundamental part of his surprising path to the presidency.