The latest polls show Lenin Moreno with a lead of two to four percentage points heading into Sunday’s presidential election. (Jose Jacome/EPA)

After a string of electoral defeats that have shifted Latin America toward the right, it is perhaps only fitting that the region’s leftists hope to halt the slide by looking to a man named after a Bolshevik revolutionary.

But Lenín Moreno, 64, is no left-wing firebrand, and that may be one of the biggest reasons he appears to have a slight lead going into Sunday’s presidential election in Ecuador.

Despite its relatively small size, this nation of 16 million at Earth’s equator has a pivotal role in Latin American politics. For the past decade Ecuador has been led by President Rafael Correa, one of the leading figures in a left-populist movement that dominated at the ballot box, in part by plowing revenue from high prices for oil and other commodities into reducing poverty.

Moreno, Correa’s former vice president, is running on the promise that he will keep those social-welfare policies going, but without the authoritarian tendencies and political polarization they also engendered. If Correa was something of a chest-baring, macho-man Marxist, even challenging his opponents to physical fights, Moreno is the temperamental and physical opposite.

For one, he is in a wheelchair, left paraplegic by gunmen who shot him in a 1998 carjacking. He has a gentle manner and a warm smile. He’s written books about battling depression with the therapeutic power of humor, and recently served as a U.N. special envoy for the rights of the disabled. Even his opponents concede he is a really, really nice guy.

Vowing to end the “dictatorship of one party rule,” opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso has urged Ecuadorans to restore “democracy, freedom, prosperity and free speech.” (Robert Puglla/EPA)

It’s as if ultra-polite Mike Pence were to run for president after years of polarizing Trump rule.

“Lenín is a leader who seeks consensus and dialogue,” said Pabel Muñoz, a spokesman for his campaign and a congressman from Correa’s National Alliance party, which controls Ecuador’s legislature. Like everyone here, he referred to the candidate by his first name.

“We have a platform that offers the adjustments Ecuador needs, without throwing everything in the trash,” said Muñoz, adding that a Moreno victory would stop Latin America’s right wing resurgence.

Conservative candidates have won recent presidential elections in Argentina and Peru, as well as mayoral races in Brazil, where leftist president Dilma Rousseff was impeached last year.

They have attracted supporters with simple calls for “change,” and that too has been the banner of Ecuadoran conservative candidate Guillermo Lasso, 61, a former banking executive.

Lasso has worked to unite Ecuador’s fractious opposition, appealing to the many people frustrated with the country’s stagnant economy and Correa’s heavy-handed rule.

[WikiLeaks founder’s asylum is at stake when Ecuador votes Sunday]

Ecuador, an OPEC nation, has been reeling from the global slump in oil prices, but the government has largely maintained spending by taking on new debt, leaving many analysts to predict that whoever wins Sunday will face a painful financial reckoning.

Lasso will be the underdog Sunday, with the latest polls showing him trailing by two to four percentage points. But there are signs he could benefit from a last-minute surge of support.

At a soccer game on Tuesday, he and his family were accosted by pro-government hooligans who pelted them with bottles and rocks, as police shielded them from the mob. The scene was condemned by Moreno, but the attackers were widely seen as paid government thugs, and the unseemly spectacle appears to have boosted Lasso.

The episode also fueled perceptions of a government willing to do almost anything to ensure a Moreno victory. Lasso’s campaign has also used this week’s deterioration in Venezuela — whose government is aligned with Correa — to appeal to Ecuadorans who fear their country will follow a similar path in the absence of a leadership change.

Vowing to end the “dictatorship of one party rule,” Lasso urged Ecuadorans in his final campaign speech to restore “democracy, freedom, prosperity and free speech.”

Lasso’s campaign has succeeded despite the material advantages Correa’s government has given the Moreno campaign, analysts say. State-controlled media promote Moreno’s candidacy while government workers go door to door in poor neighborhoods promising new homes, jobs and other benefits.

Correa and his government has used the final weeks of the campaign to stage ribbon-cutting ceremonies on major public-works projects, including the country’s largest hospital. They have cast Lasso as an unscrupulous capitalist who would plunge the country back into the volatility of the pre-Correa years.

Moreno enjoys especially high levels of support in the areas devastated by last year’s 7.8 earthquake, because the government has won praise for its rebuilding effort.

“Lasso has tried to offer an alternative to Correa rule, but it’s very hard to compete with the power of the government, so his chances to win are small,” said César Montúfar, a political scientist and former congressional candidate. “It’s like running a 100-meter dash against an opponent who is riding a motorcycle.”

If Moreno wins Sunday, even government critics concede that it’ll be in part because the Correa government is more politically adept and media-savvy than some of the region’s other leftists. As Correa’s top diplomat said this week to push back at the Lasso campaign: “Ecuador is not Venezuela.”

[Stripped of their power, Venezuelan lawmakers accuse Maduro of “coup”]

While Moreno’s running mate, Jorge Glas, is Correa’s current vice president and a childhood friend, Moreno does not have a close relationship with the president. He clashed with Correa and the National Alliance party in 2015 over the prosecution of a political cartoonist in a major press-freedom case. Moreno also opposed lifting presidential-term limits when Correa appeared to be angling for a constitutional change allowing him to remain in power.

With the country on edge and both sides denouncing dirty tricks, many here worry that a narrow vote margin Sunday night could lead to cries of fraud and unrest in the streets.

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