Friday, 20 October 2017

The virtue of Ecuador’s Leninism

IN FEBRUARY Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s then-president, compared the country’s run-off election to the battle of Stalingrad. “We are going to fight the worldwide right wing,” he said. His man, Lenín Moreno, duly scored a narrow victory against Guillermo Lasso, a conservative banker. Yet with Mr Moreno in office for less than five months, Mr Correa has now turned his rhetorical fire against his former ally, calling him “a hypocrite” and a “compulsive liar” who has achieved “what the opposition didn’t manage in ten years, to discredit our revolution”.

Mr Correa is alarmed because, to the surprise of many, Mr Moreno has turned out to be his own man with his own ideas. And that has implications beyond Ecuador, a country of 17m people that was notorious for political instability before Mr Correa took charge in 2007 as part of a wave of populist leftist leaders in South America. Benefiting from an oil windfall, he ruled as a paternalist autocrat. In what he called a...Continue reading

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