How Noboa Avoided the Incumbency Trap

Center-right incumbent Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s presidential runoff election on Sunday, defeating Luisa González by more than 10 points. Noboa, the 37-year-old son of a banana magnate, earned 55.6 percent of the vote to González’s 44.4 percent. González alleged electoral fraud and said that she would request a recount, but a growing number of opposition figures have acknowledged her defeat.

Noboa’s reelection is not surprising at first glance. After all, campaign wisdom holds that an incumbent candidate often has significant advantages, including name recognition, experience, and the ability to enact policy during a campaign.

Yet incumbents have lost most recent national elections in Latin America. Incumbent candidates have lost in 22 of the 27 free and fair presidential elections held in the region since 2018, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. This trend was also visible on a global scale in 2024, when incumbent parties lost vote shares in the overwhelming majority of national elections.

Latin Americans have long used the so-called voto castigo, or punishment vote, to express frustration with the status quo and reject governing parties, irrespective of their ideological orientation. Although anti-incumbent sentiment can reflect a healthy democratic demand for accountability, the continuous rejection of governing parties may also highlight deeper discontent—which risks undermining public support for democratic governance.

Latin America’s anti-incumbency trend predates the COVID-19 pandemic. It has often been linked to dissatisfaction with public services, such as security, health care, and education; outrage with corruption scandals; and, perhaps most importantly, low economic growth.

In fact, research suggests that presidential popularity in Latin America—and leaders’ prospects of reelection—depend on factors that governments cannot control, such as global commodity prices and international interest rates. This helps explain why regional incumbents were more successful in elections during the commodity boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Mainstays of that era included the Workers Party’ in Brazil, the Kirchner political dynasty in Argentina, and former President Evo Morales’s movement in Bolivia. Since then, they have all struggled.

There are some signs that anti-incumbency sentiment is breaking down. In Paraguay’s 2023 presidential election, the right-wing Colorado Party—which has dominated politics for decades—won despite allegations of corruption against party leaders. Last year, both Dominican President Luis Abinader and Mexico’s ruling Morena party triumphed. With Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador unable to run for reelection, his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, was easily elected as the country’s first woman leader.

Finally, popular right-wing President Nayib Bukele secured a landslide win in El Salvador’s 2024 election, earning more than 80 percent of the vote. That victory came with an asterisk: It was blatantly illegal. El Salvador’s constitution, like several others in Latin America, bars incumbent presidents from seeking consecutive terms. But Bukele appointed friendly judges to the Constitutional Court, and they reinterpreted the constitution and paved his path to reelection.

Bukele’s reelection must be understood in the context of his authoritarian impulses. Since taking office in 2019, he has eroded checks and balances and curtailed individual rights, imprisoning at least 85,000 people without due process. Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the U.S. government deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 migrants—also without due process—is now languishing in Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center.

In most other cases of incumbent reelection victories in Latin America, the parties had unusual strengths. In Paraguay and Mexico, Colorado and Morena have partisan infrastructure that is unrivaled by their competitors. Incumbents also have the capacity to mobilize voters around signature issues, such as the crackdown on crime in El Salvador or the fight against corruption, paired with anti-Haitian sentiment, in the Dominican Republic.

In Noboa’s case, three issues help explain why he succeeded in bucking the anti-incumbency trend.

First, at the time of the runoff, he had been president for just under a year and a half—a far cry from a usual four-year term. Noboa first won a snap election in October 2023 that was triggered when his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved Congress to avoid his own impeachment. This allowed Noboa to project himself as a newcomer and convince voters that he deserved a full mandate to implement his proposals.

Second, González—the leftist opposition candidate—had a potentially decisive vulnerability. Throughout the campaign, she was plagued by questions about her long-standing ties to former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who served from 2007 to 2017 and remains a polarizing figure. He had clear authoritarian tendencies and entered into self-imposed exile in Belgium in 2017. Several years later, an Ecuadorian court found him guilty of accepting bribes. He also established close relations with Venezuela and downgraded ties to the United States.

González refused to distance herself from Correa and maintained that he was innocent. Though Correa has loyal supporters in Ecuador, González’s relationship to the former president still damaged her credibility among many voters, including in the Indigenous communities that were essential in the runoff. As such, González—chained to the past—lost many of the advantages that an opposition candidate usually boasts.

The final and key factor in Noboa’s victory was Ecuador’s severe security crisis. Homicides in the country skyrocketed more than 400 percent between 2019 and 2024. In that time, Ecuador became a hub for cocaine trafficking. Even though Noboa has not been able to decisively reduce violence—in fact, violent deaths recently surged—he has centered his presidency and his campaign around his security policies.

In January 2024, just after taking office, Noboa declared Ecuador to be in a state of “internal armed conflict,” allowing him to deploy thousands of soldiers across the country to combat gangs and charge people with terrorism for alleged ties to organized crime. Noboa has repeatedly extended the state of emergency, largely focusing on seven provinces and the capital, Quito. The day before the runoff election, he issued a declaration prolonging that state of emergency, which some observers worried could suppress the vote.

Noboa also used the security crisis to campaign as an internationally connected leader, emphasizing his ties to U.S. President Donald Trump. In March, Noboa called for the United States to designate Ecuadorian gangs as terrorist organizations. Weeks before the runoff, Noboa met with Trump in Florida and expressed an interest in building a U.S. military base in Ecuador. (A Correa-backed constitutional change in 2008 banned foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil; Noboa would presumably have to amend the charter to get his wish.)

Noboa’s campaign was not without controversy. Ecuadorian law mandates that an incumbent president running for reelection must take a leave of absence for the entire campaign period, ceding power to the vice president. Noboa largely refused to do so, only stepping down for a few days and delegating his presidential power to an ally instead. The Ecuadorian Constitutional Court ruled Noboa’s moves unconstitutional, but he has so far faced no consequences.

Only time will tell whether Noboa’s reelection is a signal that Latin America’s anti-incumbency wave is calming or whether it is an outlier. Other regional elections this year will offer clues. In August, Bolivian President Luis Arce will face a right-wing “unity bloc” and challenge from his once-mentor, Morales, who is running again despite the country’s Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruling him ineligible.

Then, in November, Chile’s presidential election is shaping up to be a heated race. Progressive President Gabriel Boric’s approval rating remains relatively low, suggesting that center-right and ultraconservative candidates are likely to have the advantage. (Boric cannot seek reelection due to term limits.)

Weeks later, in Honduras, outgoing President Xiomara Castro is similarly ineligible to run again. Defense Minister Rixi Moncada, the candidate for Castro’s party, will have to grapple with allegations of corruption and drug trafficking that have been made against other members of her party.

All these developments will be closely watched in Brazil, where voters head to the polls next year—and where Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes to be the country’s first president to be win reelection in more than a decade. (Lula himself previously served as president from 2003 to 2011.)

At its best, anti-incumbent sentiment helps break political dynasties and reminds leaders that the public will hold them accountable. But at its worst, it furthers political instability by bringing constant policy fluctuations and encouraging political polarization. Regardless of its effects, elected leaders across the globe will be paying close attention to Latin American parties—and leaders such as Noboa—to see if they can establish a playbook for incumbent success.