Correa declares victory in Ecuador
Results mirror exit polls that puts Rafael Correa way ahead in the presidential race.
Victory speech
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“We are just instruments of the power of the people. This is a clear message that the people want change” Rafeal Correa |
He said he would keep his promise to carry out widespread reforms which include re-negotiating debt agreements, opposing a US free-trade pact and re-writing the constitution.
“The people have given us a clear mandate, with the second largest margin in the last 30 years of democracy,” he later told reporters in his tropical home city Guayaquil.
“We want a deep political reform.”
However, Noboa, a billionaire banana magnate, rejected Sunday’s early results, saying he would wait for the official count to end.
He said in a television interview: “I know in my interior that I won. The electoral tribunal will give the official figure once it has finished the vote count.”
Citizens’ revolution
Correa won a place in Sunday’s run-off by pledging a “citizens’ revolution” against the discredited country’s political system.
Ecuadoreans have driven the last three elected presidents from power and Correa appealed to voters as a fresh face in a field of established politicians.
He has pledged to construct 100,000 low-cost homes and copied Noboa’s promise to double to $36 a “poverty bonus” that 1.2 million poor Ecuadoreans receive each month.
Correa’s election would add another member to South America’s grouping of left-leaning nations, which already includes Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.