Guillermo Lasso will be sworn in today as the new president of Ecuador determined to lead the change of direction that its citizens want, after a decade and a half of omnipresence of the fugitive Rafael Correa. A major challenge: the Andean country, hit by the pandemic and its significant collateral damage, leads the continental ranking of nations where extreme poverty has grown the most, along with Mexico and Honduras, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ( ECLAC).

Extreme poverty, hunger in short, has increased in Ecuador from 7.6% to 12.8%. The person in charge of confronting it from day one is Simón Cueva, Minister of Economy and Finance who appears in the “Government of the meeting” as the least liberal file, closest to social democracy, to confirm the shift to the center that Lasso has already started in the campaign.

“It's the key. There were other economists further to the right, but Lasso has appointed a career official from the Central Bank with very good relations in multilateral organizations.. His position guarantees private property and progress in labor and tax reforms, but he is not going to ignore the social either.. There is congruence with the campaign discourse: seek growth with social justice. Circumstances do not allow otherwise. There are sectors with a very complex vulnerability”, reveals to EL MUNDO Matías Abad, analyst and professor of Global Studies at the University of Azuay.

Economic weakness is felt daily in the country: four out of 10 Ecuadorians suffer from difficulties eating and seven out of 10 lack adequate jobs, anchored in informality and street sales..

In the new government there is also a convergence from the former president of the banking association to social fighters. In a nod to the other part of the country that supported him in the second round of elections, Lasso has confirmed Tannya Varela in his position as Police Commander General, the first woman to have accessed that position in the entire region..

“We are going to put order in the economy with a social sense, a supportive management and aware of the Ecuadorian reality,” confirmed Lasso himself on his social networks, the same ones that pushed him so much to defeat the candidate of the citizen revolution.

Along with the economy, the other great challenge for the former banker will be the management of the pandemic and the vaccination plan, with a great objective: to immunize nine million Ecuadorians in his first 100 days of government.. Lasso has already communicated with the US, Russia, the UK and China. “The president contemplates the figure of borrowing vaccines from other countries that do have stocks and are slow in their application so that they provide the doses. As the contracts that Ecuador has with the manufacturing houses are fulfilled, the vaccines would go directly to those countries,” warns Abad.

The small earthquake that occurred within the National Assembly makes governance even more difficult for Lasso and his team. The leader of the CREO Movement refused at the last minute to sign the controversial agreement reached between his electoral ally, the Social Christian Party (PSC), and correísmo, which opened Pandora's box of pardons for those punished for corruption.

Lasso himself decided to support Pachakutik and Izquierda Democrática, which elevated the indigenous leader Guadalupe Llori, a former political prisoner of Correa's dungeons, to the parliamentary presidency..

The rupture seems definitive with the PSC, which is going to cause that each law that is tried to be approved will suffer a true parliamentary way of the cross. “Lasso is going to need to reach consensus, as occurs in other democracies. The Executive is going to have less room for maneuver, which puts hyper-presidentialism aside,” says Michel Levi, coordinator of the Andean Center for International Studies for this newspaper..

With all eyes on what is happening in Colombia and Chile (Ecuador opened the cascade of anti-government protests in 2019), the new Government knows that the political and social cauldron is boiling. “As long as the pandemic is not effectively combated and the social sector is not prioritized as a necessary actor for the balance of the country, the government that arrives will probably navigate difficult waters,” Levi predicts..