Ecuador's Noboa sweeps his vice president aside in electoral dispute

President Daniel Noboa removed his second-in-command as a political obstacle in Ecuador, while electoral authorities disqualified a conservative candidate ahead of February’s election.

The presidency announced that Planning Secretary Sariha Moya would replace Vice President Veronica Abad in an acting capacity on Monday. Abad was suspended by the labor ministry for 150 days last week after she was late in relocating to Turkey from Israel, where she is serving as a peace envoy.

The feud between Noboa, who must take leave from the presidency in January to run for re-election, began during last year’s snap campaign. Abad, a libertarian, blames the estrangement on Noboa’s willingness to cut a congressional deal with a left-wing party, and accuses him of pushing her aside to avoid having to hand her the reins of power.

“They intend to disqualify me for five months for an offense not committed and without any proof, 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 eventual presidency and his business interests with local governments, ruling that he hadn’t credibly divested them.

With no option to appeal, his SUMA party will be taking online applications to select a new candidate in the 10 days it has to pick a replacement. “It’s disgusting,” Topic said Monday during a news conference in Quito, blaming Noboa for the ruling.

Ecuador is facing crippling blackouts and a looming recession as Noboa fights several crises at once ahead of his re-election bid. While polls haven’t been released since before the lights started going out in September, they previously indicated the 36-year-old heir to a banana fortune was Ecuador’s most popular politician, followed by Luisa Gonzalez, his left-wing opponent in last year’s runoff vote, and Topic in third place amid a field of 16.

While Abad can only be permanently removed if Congress impeaches her, Noboa has the right to replace her in the case that she’s temporarily absent from her post. And as an existing cabinet appointee, Moya qualifies to serve as vice president in her place.

The president is nevertheless being criticized, given the executive-branch swap and Topic court ruling occurred in rapid succession.

“The Topic issue is grave, it’s anti-democratic,” Sofia Cordero, a political scientist at FLACSO Ecuador in Quito, said by phone. The vice president’s case is “much more serious,” she added, calling it “a gross violation of the constitution amid a series of grotesque illegal acts that fails to respect the will of the voters.”

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

Elected to serve out the last 18 months of Lasso’s term, Noboa’s crackdown on crime took his approval ratings to 80% after armed thugs shocked the nation in January by briefly seizing a television set during a live broadcast.

Homicides are down 17%, while police have shot and killed 100 suspects dubbed “terrorists” since Noboa declared an internal war on narco gangs. He also used his popularity to push through a tax increase that helped secure a deal with the International Monetary Fund, easing fiscal pressures.

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

Abad says she fell out with Noboa after opposing a legislative deal with two parties — Gonzalez’s Citizen Revolution, or RC, and its junior partner, the Social Christian Party, on whose ticket Topic ran in 2023 — to secure a temporary congressional majority. That pact collapsed when the president ordered police to storm the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest fugitive former Vice President Jorge Glas, a leading RC politician.

While the vice president complied with Noboa’s decision to post her to Ecuador’s embassy in Tel Aviv so as to not be accused of dereliction of duty, she complained about being sent into a war zone as a result of their dispute. The foreign ministry ordered Abad to decamp to Turkey as of Sept. 1 amid the widening Israeli conflict, with the labor ministry then suspending her without pay for being unjustifiably absent from her new office for several days.

Those disciplinary measures were “a gross violation of the Constitution and Ecuadorian laws as an administrative measure not applicable to elected officials” after she had refused to cave in to pressure to resign, Abad said in her video message. She called on authorities including the National Assembly and the attorney general’s office to review her case.