EDITORIAL
"It's Official", reads the report of teleSUR, "Lenin Moreno elected President of Ecuador". Ecuadorean eleciton authorities made the results of the presidential election official Tuesday, announcing a win for renowned disability activist and former vice president Lenin Moreno of President Rafael Correa's governing Alianza Pais party. With 99.65 percent of the votes counted, the National Electoral Council, known as CNE, said the trend of Moreno's win was irreversible and that the results showed the will of the Ecuadoreans".
Moreno and his vice president Jorge Glass won with 5,057,149 votes or 51.16 percent over former banker Guillermo Lasso and his vice president Andres Paez, of the right-wing CREO-SUMA alliance, who secured 4,827,753 votes and 48.84 percent.
“We want to dignify politics, to be a good example for citizens, especially for our youth,” Moreno said in a press conference in Quito after the CNE announced the official results.
However- and despite the celebrations by parts of the communist Left around the world - Moreno's electoral victory does not consist a revolutionary act. In fact, both the two candidates- Moreno and Lasso- do not challenge the capitalist way of development. Both the governing Allianza Pais and the right-wing CREO-SUMA alliance have a common strategy: they both aim in preserve the capitalist economic model. Their difference lies on the mixture of policies which will better serve the interests of the local bourgeoisie.
The so-called "Citizens' Revolution" of Rafael Correa, which Lenin Moreno has promised to continue, did not consist an actual socialist revolution, but a way of managing the current capitalist economy of Ecuador. After all, it is no secret that Correa's policy has been praised and supported by numerous opportunists and social democratic forces in Europe like, for example, SYRIZA.
Like the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia, the period of Rafael Correa's leadership in Ecuador consists a proof that the so-called "21st century socialism" is nothing but another mode of capitalism's management. Within this framework of capitalist economy, the promises for "pro-people, pro-workers" policies are pure illusions aimed at trapping large working masses into the bourgeois political agenda.
The answer to capitalist barbarity does not lie in the social democratic recipes of Mr.Correa or Mr.Moreno. What the working people of Ecuador need is to organise and strengthen their struggle against capital and its power. For that, a necessary prerequisite is the strengthening of the communist-revolutionary forces in the country towards a large, working class front against capitalist exploitation and its servants.
