Guillermo Granja/Reuters
A supporter of President Rafael Correa held a poster, “We already have a president, we have Rafael,” in Ambato, Ecuador.
CARACAS, Venezuela — In the final analysis, Edwin Tatés supports President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and wants him to be re-elected. He just does not want it to be too easy.
So for the election on Sunday, Mr. Tatés, a 39-year-old father of two, plans to vote against the president, in the hope that the contest will go to a runoff — and possibly curb the president’s rampant ego.
“The bad thing about him is his arrogance and that he insults all his opponents, and if he wins in the first round he will think he’s better than everyone else, and he will be even worse,” said Mr. Tatés, who lives in the capital, Quito.
Mr. Correa holds a hefty lead in polls and, with or without Mr. Tatés’s help, seems likely to cruise to re-election. That alone is remarkable in a country that had seven presidents in the decade before Mr. Correa took office in January 2007, including, at one point, three in one month.
A new four-year term, the last allowed under the new Constitution he pushed for in 2008, would be pivotal for Mr. Correa, who has pledged to deepen and consolidate what he calls a Citizen Revolution. That means continuing policies that favor the country’s poor, including expanded health care, improved schools, better roads in rural areas and monthly grants to poor families.
It may also give Mr. Correa a chance to raise his international profile. With the ailing president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, sidelined by cancer, Mr. Correa is arguably the most vocal leftist leader in the region. He made international headlines last year when he defied Britain by granting asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Mr. Correa seems so confident that he will win re-election that he has focused his campaign on winning a majority for his party, Alianza País, in the National Assembly.
“We need a convincing majority in the Assembly to pass the laws that have been blocked by these irresponsible people who want to harm the government and who don’t care if they harm the country,” Mr. Correa, 49, said at a rally last month.
At the top of Mr. Correa’s agenda is a long-stalled law regulating the news media that critics say would crimp press freedom. Opponents fear a legislative majority would feed what they see as Mr. Correa’s authoritarian tendencies.
“There is a lot of apprehension that if he wins the Assembly, there will be a greater concentration of power,” said José Hernández, an editor of Hoy, a Quito daily newspaper. “He will try to flatten everyone who is in his way. He will try to dominate more because that’s his personality, and that’s what he wants to do.”
Since he first took office in 2007, Mr. Correa has expanded presidential power and vigorously pursued opponents. A judicial overhaul extended his influence to the courts. Laws meant for terrorists have been used to jail antigovernment protesters. While he has worked in the past with other parties to create a coalition to pass laws in the legislature, his own party has never had a majority on its own.
“We have suffered four years of constant opposition to laws that are required by the Constitution,” said Rosana Alvarado, an Alianza País member of the Assembly who is running for re-election. “If the president has opponents in the Assembly instead of collaborators, this government cannot continue to the degree required by a process of transformation.”
An economist who studied at the University of Illinois, Mr. Correa has an irascible governing style, and perhaps no group has come in for more of his vituperation than the news media. He has run a crusade against the press, suing newspapers and journalists and accusing them of being out to destroy his government.
He has repeatedly tried to pass a communications law that would impose strict penalties on reporters and news media outlets in cases of libel or errors; it would also create a commission to regulate journalists’ activities.
He has governed during a period of relative prosperity. Ecuador is the smallest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, yet oil sales account for about half of the country’s income from exports and about a third of all tax revenues, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.
Ecuadoreans Are Apprehensive Over Likely Re-Election of President Correa
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Ecuadoreans Are Apprehensive Over Likely Re-Election of President Correa
