Ecuador: Alianza Pais political party capacity to govern has been reduced

Thea Riofrancos/jacobinmag.com

Ecuador’s natural resources have both fueled reductions in inequality and obscured the need for deeper transformation.

Although Lenin Moreno managed to win his election campaign, his left party and the party of former president Rafael Correa, Alianza Pais (AP), no longer enjoys a legislative supermajority and has lost several important elections at the municipal and provincial levels.

Because of this, the party’s capacity to govern has been reduced. One reason why: the economic recession, brought on by the precipitous decline in oil prices in 2014, and the resulting budget cuts. According to the finance minister himself, it’s an “austere budget.”

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There are three key features of the current Ecuadorian predicament: the tense relationship between social movements and the state; the persistent challenge of left party-building, and the double-edged sword of commodity dependency. Each of the features helps explain the Left’s position — and why it has been unable to move towards the promise oftwenty-first century socialism……….

These three features — the tense relationship between social movements and the state, the challenge of left party-building, and the ambivalent realities of commodity dependency — are intimately related. The transition away from the extractive model of accumulation (and from capitalism itself), and its replacement with the popular and solidarity economy that the government has promised, would require the building of militant popular organizations that are allied with but autonomous from the state.

Thus, in Ecuador, the persistence of ruling-class power is enabled by the weakness of the popular sectors.

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