Technocratic ethos and the evocation of the past: discursive resources of Daniel Noboa and Luisa González during the first round televised debate in the Ecuador 2023 presidential election

Abstract

This paper examines, through the categories of discursive scenography and the actancial mythic schema, the textual and contextual elements that configured the speeches of presidential candidates Daniel Noboa and Luisa González, during the first round televised debate for the early elections of 2023 in Ecuador. Gonzalez elaborated a narrative that placed her party and the figure of former President Rafael Correa at the center of the story. Noboa generated a technocratic rhetoric with emphasis on the self as enunciator and with references to the future. The actancial scheme shows the desire to communicate a story, in the case of Gonzalez, while Noboa outlined an image distanced from the canonical dramatic aspects. The interventions show that the elements, both of the scenography and of the mythical narrative discourse, lose effectiveness when the expectations of the audience to which they are oriented are left aside.