Ecuador’s presidential race is headed to a second round on April 13 after sitting President Daniel Noboa and his main rival, left-leaning Luisa González, came within a sliver of a percentage point of each other.

With over 90% of the votes counted on Monday morning, Noboa had 44.3% of the vote, while González had 43.8%.

The candidates required either more than 50% of the votes, or more than 40% with a ten-point margin, to win outright. 

The winner will take office on May 24 and serve until May 24, 2029. They will face a challenging scenario of organized crime, electricity shortages, and a lackluster economy.

Ecuador’s youngest-ever president, at 37, Noboa has been in office just a year and two months. He won the snap May 2023 elections his predecessor Guillermo Lasso had called for after invoking a constitutional clause known as two-way death, which also dissolved the national assembly.

Noboa is the son of Álvaro Noboa, a banana business giant who also ran for president several times. He studied administration in New York before entering the family business and also holds a master’s degree in political communication from George Washington University.

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González, 47, is a lawyer with postgraduate degrees in management and development economics. She held a number of senior government positions during Rafael Correa’s decade-long presidency and has promised to bring back some of the social policies from his terms in office.

Correa is a polarizing mentor. Supporters view him as a progressive leader whose redistributive policies helped the poor and strengthened the healthcare system. However, he was convicted of corruption and sentenced to eight years in prison in 2020 and is currently living in exile in Belgium. Correa has claimed the case against him is politically motivated.

Will Freeman, a Latin American Studies fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Herald ahead of the vote that lengthy blackouts, the rise of violent crime, and an ailing economy made for a grim re-election scenario for Noboa — but that anti-Correa sentiment could prove strong enough for González to lose anyway.

Social leader Leonidas Iza got 5.3% of the vote and activist Andrea González got 2.7% of the vote. None of the other candidates got more than 1%.