Ecuador referendum voters deliver stinging defeat to Noboa

Stephan Kueffner, Bloomberg News on Nov 16, 2025

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Ecuador’s voters delivered a sharp and surprising repudiation of President Daniel Noboa’s attempt to consolidate power, defying the polls and rejecting his proposals for constitutional reform.

In a nationwide referendum, Ecuadorians spurned Noboa’s proposals to create a new constitutional assembly, to allow the return of foreign military bases, to end a state fund for political parties and to slash the number of lawmakers. Surveys leading up to the vote had indicated all four measures would pass.

“We consulted Ecuadorians and they have spoken,” Noboa said in a post on X late Sunday. “We respect the will of the Ecuadorian people.”

Voters balked at Noboa’s caginess about his plans for the new constitution, which he said he would unveil only once they had made their choice. He also raised worries about the nation’s cherished Galapagos Islands when he suggested a U.S. base that existed there in World War II could return to help Ecuador fight illegal fishing.

“The results are a clear rebuke of President Noboa and his policies, and he will emerge weakened from the vote,” said Eurasia Latin America director Risa Grais-Targow.

The results are likely to be viewed by investors as a setback. Ecuador bonds have rallied in recent months as Noboa appeared poised to further cement his base of power and implement more market-friendly reforms.

More than 80% or 11.2 million of the 14 million voting-age Ecuadorians showed up at the polls. Noboa, who was first elected in 2023 to a partial term and won his first full term in April, had won a following with a hard-line approach to crime. He declared the Andean nation in an internal war on drug trafficking organizations in January of last year, referring to them as terrorists. But his security-related proposals failed to resonate this time.

On Sunday before the polls closed, Noboa announced that the alleged leader of Ecuadorian criminal group Los Lobos was captured in Spain. “To combat transnational crime, international cooperation is a must,” Noboa said of the detention of Wilmer “Pipo” Chavarría.

Left-wing political organizations campaigned against Noboa’s referendums, which came just weeks after he surprisingly ended a diesel fuel subsidy, leading to widespread protests.

“Daniel Noboa doesn’t have the backing of the population,” Luisa González, who lost to the 37-year-old heir to a banana fortune in the April presidential vote, told reporters in Quito.

Noboa first won the presidency in an out-of-cycle election in October 2023 marred by the assassination of anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a former investigative journalist.

In the National Assembly, Ecuador’s legislature, Noboa’s Democratic National Action holds a narrow majority over Citizen Revolution with support from breakaway lawmakers of left-wing Indigenous and Green Party Pachakutik.

“While I don’t see immediate risks to his tenure, the strength of his majority in the National Assembly will probably begin to fray, and he may be tempted to pursue more populist policies to recoup support,” said Eurasia’s Grais-Targow.