I'm sure you've all heard the expression "people get the government they deserve." Doug Casey repeats it ad nauseum. Well, the people of Ecuador sure don't deserve this one, and they'll soon make their feelings known.

Let's see now...geeee I hate choices

23 parties, eh? OK, let's do the math, bearing in mind:

Proposed changes to the election code make it mandatory to have 5% of the signatures of qualified voters in order to form a political party.

So, 23 X 5% = 115% Uh oh. That's three gone for sure.

Now, the franchised population of Ecuador is about 9M (trust me, it is)

So, how many will vote AP? 50%? Not likely, but let's use 50% for now. So, that leaves 4.5 M. 5% of 9M is 450,000. So, if everybody signs up, you can have a maximum of 10 parties, plus AP. So, ask yourself this: how likely is it that 10 parties will divide the total of remaining eligible voters equally between them? How likely is it they'll even be able to reach most of them?

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize there's hardly any chance of these little parties making the cut. That brings it down to 2 or 3 that get the required number of signatures, maybe 4 or 5 if AP lacks support and only gets 25%, which I think is a more realistic number. Incidently, only 5 parties managed to win more than 5% of the popular vote in the last election, so it wouldn't matter if there were 100 parties on that list. Only 5 or 6 of them matter anyway.

So, worst case it's a 6 way race. Now if AP gets 40% of the popular vote, which is really optimistic IMO, and the other parties get the rest, then you'd need a coalition of AP and some other party to govern. But wait! AP is already a coalition of the left, so that leaves only center and right parties to form a coalition with.

Any way you slice it, AP is toast. At the very least, they'll be severely humbled and forced to govern from the center.

ebear