DM

From my point of view, after this electoral process, the political left in Ecuador no longer exists. With reference to the immediate past, what we had defined as progressivism today no longer represents what we had once wanted it to represent. Its evolution, through the logic of government associated with realpolitik, has led it to live together relatively comfortably with sectors of big capital and the transnational corporations that run the national economy.

There is therefore a mismatch, which has become more evident over the years, between what progressivism is today and the inalienable values articulated in the history of social struggles led by the Left.

It is enough to highlight how progressivism lacks any sense of class in the current moment, how it has forgotten debates linked to private property, over who controls the means of production, or how it has forgotten all references to real nationalization of the strategic sectors, or of the sectors that would develop its capacity to intervene in the public interest, among many other things that form part of the historical legacy and values of the Left.

On the other hand, the Left of the left of governmental progressivism has also lost its political compass in Ecuador. Its current support for a political party that is the expression of the interests of national and international financial capital cannot be understood as anything other than the mortgaging of its political ideology in order to intensify the conflict with the current government.

This opens up a new situation in Ecuador, insofar as it makes the necessity of rebuilding a left an urgent and fundamental task. However, this reconstruction must be done with new social sectors and a new political generation, possibly even projecting itself politically.

All of this must depart from a fundamental debate, which is about what we understand the Left to be 228 years after the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution; and what type of left Ecuador needs today, rooted in the social, economic, cultural, and political problems that the country is currently living through.