Ecuador’s Noboa sidelines his vice president in election dispute

(Bloomberg) — President Daniel Noboa fired his second-in-command in Ecuador over political obstruction, while electoral officials disqualified a conservative candidate ahead of February’s election.

The President announced that Planning Secretary Sarriha Moya would replace Vice President Veronica Abad in an acting capacity on Monday. Abad was suspended for 150 days by the Labor Ministry last week for delaying her transfer from Israel to Turkey, where she is working as a peace envoy.

The feud between Ngoba, who will have to step down from the presidency in January to run for re-election, began during last year’s snap campaign. Abad, a liberal, blames the alienation on Noboa’s desire to cut a Congress deal with a leftist party, and accuses him of pushing her aside to avoid handing over the reins of power.

“They intend to disqualify me for five months for a crime without any reason and without any evidence, with the sole purpose of preventing me from assuming the presidency,” Abad said in a video message distributed late Sunday. ”

Separately, the Electoral Disputes Court confirmed the disqualification of conservative candidate Jan Topic. It cited a potential conflict of interest between his last presidency and his business interests with local governments, and ruled that he had not credibly divested them.

With no option to appeal, his SUMA party will take online applications to select a new candidate in 10 days, in which he will have to choose a replacement. Topic blamed Noboa for the decision during a press conference in Quito on Monday, saying, “It is disgusting.”

Ecuador faces massive blackouts and a looming recession as Noboa juggles multiple crises ahead of his re-election bid. Although polls have not been released since before lights out in September, they previously indicated the 36-year-old banana-owning heir was Ecuador’s most popular politician, followed last year by his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Runoff votes, and placed third among the field of 16.

While Abad can only be permanently removed if Congress impeaches him, Noboa has the right to replace him if he is temporarily absent from office. And as a sitting Cabinet appointee, Moya qualifies to serve as vice president in his place.

Nevertheless, the president has been criticized for making the executive-branch exchange and the subject court decision happen so rapidly.

“The issue is serious, it is undemocratic,” Sofia Cordero, a political scientist at FLACSO Ecuador in Quito, said by phone. The vice president’s case is “much more serious”, calling it a “gross violation of the Constitution amid a series of bizarre illegal acts that fail to respect the will of the voters”.

Noboa’s predecessor, former President Guillermo Lasso, also criticized these steps, saying in a post on Twitter that they “represent a risk to the stability of our democracy.”

Elected to complete the final 18 months of Lasso’s term, Noboa’s crackdown on crime took his approval rating to 80%, when in January armed thugs shocked the country by seizing a television set during a live broadcast. Was shocked.

Murders have dropped by 17%, while police have shot dead 100 suspects labeled “terrorists” since Noboa declared an internal war on narco gangs. He also used his popularity to push for tax increases, which helped secure an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which eased fiscal pressures.

But power grid problems are taking a toll on Noboa. The power industry is unable to meet demand due to a prolonged drought, which led to the first blackouts in late 2023, leaving homes and businesses without power for several hours a day as hydropower plants lacked water.

Abad says the two parties — Gonzalez’s Civic Revolution, or RC, and its junior partner, the Social Christian Party, on whose ticket Topic ran in 2023 — are likely to oppose a legislative agreement to achieve a temporary congressional majority. Later she separated from Noboa. That agreement collapsed when the president ordered police to storm the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest fugitive former Vice President Jorge Glass, a prominent RC politician.

While the Vice President complied with Noboa’s decision to post him to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Tel Aviv so that he would not be accused of dereliction of duty, he complained about being sent to a war zone as a result of their dispute. The Foreign Ministry ordered Abad to flee to Turkey on September 1 amid the escalating Israeli conflict, after which the Labor Ministry suspended him without pay for being unreasonably absent from his new office for several days.

Abad said in his video message that those disciplinary measures were “a gross violation of the Constitution and the laws of Ecuador as an administrative measure not applicable to elected officials” because he had refused to bow to pressure to resign. He called on authorities, including the National Assembly and the Attorney General’s office, to review his case.

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