Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s center-right president, is facing re-election after 15 months in office.

His predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, called for early elections in 2023 amid impeachment proceedings over embezzlement accusations.

Mr. Noboa, 37, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who comes from one of Ecuador’s wealthiest families, rose unexpectedly in the polls to win election and serve out the remainder of Mr. Lasso’s term.

At stake is the direction the troubled nation of nearly 18 million will take as it grapples with drug-fueled violence and high unemployment, issues that have sent tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans to the United States.

Why is this election important?

Five years ago, Mr. Noboa was a political unknown. He was elected to the country’s legislature in 2021 and served one term.

During the 2023 elections to replace Mr. Lasso, he rose from the bottom of the polls in the first round of voting to score a second-place victory after a strong debate performance. He then beat a leftist establishment candidate, Luisa González, in the second round.

Ms. González is running again and represents the party of a powerful former president, Rafael Correa, a polarizing figure in Ecuador. Many voters express nostalgia over the low violence and strong economy that characterized his presidency, while others remember his authoritarian style and his conviction on corruption charges.

For years Mr. Correa’s leftist movement has defined Ecuadorean politics, but some analysts say that if Mr. Noboa wins he has the potential to create a movement of his own.

Mr. Noboa’s party, which was formed less than a year ago, is predicted in polls to win about a third of the seats in the legislature — the same as Mr. Correa’s party.

Who are the top candidates?

Mr. Noboa was first elected on the back of a desperate desire for change following an explosion of insecurity in Ecuador and a particularly bloody 2023 election cycle, including the assassination of another presidential candidate.

Though violence, along with unemployment, remain high, he has leaned on a deft social media strategy to project an image of youth and vigor that has captivated many of his constituents.

In an effort to quell worsening violence and an outbreak of prison riots, Mr. Noboa last year imposed a state of internal armed conflict, allowing the military to patrol the streets and prisons.

He also sent the police into the Mexican Embassy in Quito, the capital, to arrest a politician seeking refuge from a prison sentence for corruption, in what was considered a brazen breach of diplomatic protocol. Some analysts saw the moves as an overreach of presidential authority and a threat to civil liberties.

But his supporters see him as a bold leader willing to break the rules and stand up to corrupt forces. In April, Ecuadoreans endorsed his hard-line approach when they approved a referendum enshrining the increased military presence into law.

“He has to be firm to make people respect him,” said Jessica Navarro, 34, a taxi driver in Quito.

Ms. González, the political opponent, has been defined by her relationship to Mr. Correa, who handpicked her to represent his party.

“When Rafael Correa was there, he really supported us a lot,” said Edgar Escobar, 28, a nursing student who is supporting Ms. González. “I would like to go back to that country that we had before.”

But Ledy Zúñiga, a former justice minister who is running for the National Assembly with Ms. González’s party, pushed back against the notion that she represents the past.

“It is not about going back to the past,’’ she said. “People are still eight years later blaming the things that happen to a government that is no longer here. More than going back to the past, the issue is to have a team with experience and technical knowledge, because public administration is not easy.”

What are the main issues?

Ecuador is facing persistent violence, chronic unemployment and an energy crisis. January saw more violent deaths than any month in the past three years, according to police data.

A drought last year in a country that largely depends on hydroelectric energy caused daily 14-hour power cuts for about three months. The crisis threatened water, cell and internet service, shut down businesses and endangered entire industries.

Over the past five years, the drug-trafficking industry has expanded in Ecuador, drawing in international criminal groups and unleashing extraordinary levels violence in the once-peaceful nation.

But Mr. Noboa’s campaign has generally been defined more by image — the country has been flooded with cardboard cutouts of him — and less by specific policy proposals to address his country’s challenges.

Mr. Noboa often speaks vaguely about throwing “the old Ecuador” in the trash.

Ms. González has emphasized addressing the security crisis by strengthening Ecuador’s institutions like the justice, health and education system.

When will the results be known?

Ecuadorean presidential elections typically feature two rounds of voting, with the two top candidates in the first round facing off in a second round. To win the first round outright, a candidate must receive more than 50 percent of the votes, or 40 percent of the votes with a 10-point margin over the nearest rival.

Polls show Mr. Noboa in the lead ahead of Sunday’s election, with the possibility that he could win enough votes to avoid a runoff.

Voting starts at 7 a.m. Sunday and ends at 5 p.m. Results are expected to start coming in around 6 p.m.

For decades, some members of the white Afrikaner minority have been trying to convince anyone and everyone who would listen that they are the true victims in post-apartheid South Africa.

They have made claims of mass killings of their people and widespread land grabs by a Black-led government that they insist is seeking retribution for the sins of the Afrikaner-led apartheid government. Their stories have been false or greatly exaggerated, but that hasn’t stopped them from being widely amplified and repeated online.

Afrikaners, an ethnic group that descended from European — primarily Dutch — colonizers, have found a champion of their cause in President Trump, and it has led to a moment that few of them could have imagined.

Mr. Trump on Friday put the weight of American influence behind a hotly disputed claim that Afrikaners were the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” issuing an executive order to allow them to migrate to the United States as refugees, and halting aid to South Africa.

The move was met with dismay in South Africa, a majority-Black nation where more than 90 percent of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist, apartheid regime. These groups — Black, Colored and Indian — remain statistically far behind the white minority in virtually every economic measure.

There have been gruesome murders of white farmers, the focus of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics suggest that they account for a very small share of the country’s killings.

It is not clear whether Mr. Trump’s interest in South Africa has been influenced by Elon Musk, now one of his close advisers, who was born and raised there and has been harshly critical of its government.

For Afrikaners, who make up about 4 percent of the population, Mr. Trump’s action was the culmination of years of international lobbying.

“What happened last night is probably the most significant international action” on South Africa since 1994, when the apartheid regime lost power, Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, an advocacy group, said on Saturday.

Mr. Roets has made several trips to Washington over the years to meet with lawmakers and think tanks, and has another long-planned trip coming up in two weeks, he said. His organization has not met with any officials in the second Trump administration and was not directly involved in the executive order, he said. But they have spoken with people in Mr. Trump’s orbit and have raised international awareness for their cause, he said.

“We’ve done some things wrong, but every community has done some things wrong,” Mr. Roets said of Afrikaners. “We’ve had this sense of being scapegoated and blamed for everything. The fact that there’s now a recognition is something that I think a lot of people will welcome.”

South African government officials were somewhat blindsided by Mr. Trump’s order, learning of it through news reports, said Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador in Washington.

Mr. Trump began focusing publicly on South Africa last Sunday, with posts on social media and comments to reporters, suggesting that the country’s government was seizing white-owned land.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa last month signed a law that allows the government to take private land, in limited circumstances, without compensating the owners. But legal scholars say that such seizures are subject to judicial scrutiny and that in most cases the government will compensate owners for land it acquires for public purposes.

Supporters of the law say it is needed in part to redress the imbalance created by a history of white people taking control of most land, while Black ownership was limited by force and by law.

After Mr. Trump made his comments, Mr. Musk asked Mr. Ramaphosa in a post on X, “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”

Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for Mr. Ramaphosa, said, “we have never witnessed such an escalation of diplomatic tensions,” and added that the issues Mr. Trump raised had “been laced with complete lies and distortions about our country.”

Mr. Ramaphosa spoke with Mr. Musk this past week and was “emphatic in saying we don’t have racist laws,” Mr. Magwenya said. But Mr. Musk has continued to insist that white people in South Africa are persecuted.

Kallie Kriel, chief executive of AfriForum, an Afrikaner rights organization, said South Africa’s own actions had alienated American leaders, particularly its accusation before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

While he dismissed claims that white South Africans were victims of widespread killings, he cited several laws that he said target Afrikaners. One law allows the government greater control over the language of instruction in schools, which can vary from place to place, and some Afrikaners think it will restrict use of Afrikaans in classrooms.

“It’s a direct threat on our cultural existence,” Mr. Kriel said.

Melanie Verwoerd, a former ambassador to Ireland for South Africa, said the focus on Afrikaner rights inverted the history of a people who have benefited since the 17th century from land their ancestors took from Black people. She said she was speaking “as a white person, and as an Afrikaner,” adding that it was “categorically” false that white South Africans were being persecuted.

“The vast majority of poor in this country remains Black people,” said Ms. Verwoerd. “If any group is being treated badly, or if there are any human rights abuses to talk of, then that is in fact the Blacks, not the whites.”

Mr. Ramaphosa met twice with Mr. Musk last year to discuss bringing his businesses, most notably the Starlink satellite communications system, to South Africa. In those meetings, Mr. Musk did not express concern about white people being mistreated in South Africa, Mr. Magwenya said.

Instead, Mr. Musk’s main concern was South Africa’s requirements that foreign companies cede some ownership to Black South Africans or other historically disadvantaged groups, Mr. Magwenya said. Mr. Musk told the president that he worried that it would set a bad precedent for the other markets where he operates Starlink, Mr. Magwenya said.

Mr. Musk is primarily of English, not Afrikaner, descent. Tensions are rife between white, English-speaking South Africans and Afrikaners, who are often stereotyped as more blue collar and less sophisticated.

Afrikaners tend to have a grimmer view of the country than the population at large. In a 2023 survey by the Human Sciences Research Council, 79 percent of Afrikaners said they were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy and 47 percent said they belonged to a group suffering discrimination — higher rates than any other group.

The white population, now about 4.5 million, has declined steadily for decades — there has been net out-migration of 700,000 white people since 1985, according to Statistics South Africa, the official government statistics agency. But there has been no sign — at least so far — that Afrikaners would be inclined to emigrate en masse to the United States.

Mr. Roets and the leaders of AfriForum said they wanted to remain in South Africa to make it better. They said they planned to ask the Trump administration, rather than cutting all funding to South Africa, to invest in organizations that help Afrikaner communities.

Among the primary grievances of Afrikaners is that they face violence on farms and that the government discriminates against them with policies that seek to give preference to Black South Africans in areas like business and land ownership. But proponents of race-based policies argue that because apartheid used race to oppress and impoverish the Black population, race-conscious rules are required to even the scales.

“It’s not completely devoid of all truth,” Albert Grundlingh, an emeritus professor of history at Stellenbosch University and an Afrikaner, said of Afrikaners’ concerns. “To say that as a group they’re now being downtrodden and they’ve got no prospects whatsoever, that’s an exaggeration.”

Bennie van Zyl, the general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union in South Africa, said that his fellow Afrikaners want Black farmers to be successful.

“But government makes the land issue a race issue,” he said. “For us, this is not about race — this is about success.”

Jeffrey Moyo contributed reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe.

Federal courts might be the last guard against Trump

More than 40 lawsuits have been filed in recent days by state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits seeking to erect a barrier against President Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders. Vice President JD Vance yesterday accused any judges who might block the president’s orders of acting illegally.

With a compliant Congress, and little significant resistance in either the streets or within the president’s own party, the judicial branch of the government may be the only check on his power. But while the executive branch is entrusted with the capacity for swift, decisive action, the judiciary is slow by design. Any legal opposition may struggle to keep up with Trump’s fire hose of legal disruption. There have been some measurable results: Judicial orders in nine federal court cases will, for a time, partly bind the administration’s hands.

Foreign aid: On Friday, hours before workers for the government’s main foreign aid agency were set to be suspended with pay or laid off, a court issued a limited, temporary order blocking the move. Thousands of workers were left in limbo, while millions around the world who rely on the agency watched in disbelief.

Immigration: The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — both legal and illegal — has resulted in at least 10 lawsuits. Here’s a rundown of those and other challenges.

Israeli troops left a key zone that bisects Gaza

Israel’s military yesterday withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor, leaving nearly all of Gaza’s northern territory. The move was required by the tenuous cease-fire with Hamas ahead of any talks for a longer-lasting truce.

Israel’s military presence is now mostly limited to a small sliver of southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border, and a buffer zone along the Israeli border.

Returning home: Hamas released three Israeli hostages on Saturday in exchange for 183 Palestinians jailed by Israel. Rifle-toting Hamas fighters prodded the emaciated captives to give short speeches in which the hostages thanked the militants. Five Thai citizens who had also been kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, also returned home.

Now that they are at home, previously freed hostages are expressing their relief and joy on social media, as descriptions of the torment they endured trickle out.

Dozens of Maoist rebels were killed in India, officials said

A government operation yesterday in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India left 31 Maoist guerrillas and two members of the police forces dead, police officials said. It was one of the deadliest operations in recent years against the so-called Naxalite movement, leftist rebels who have waged an insurgency over several decades.

Context: The insurgency began in eastern India in the 1960s, with violence peaking in 2010, when hundreds of civilians and security force members were killed.

Politics: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national governing party swept to victory in an important regional election in New Delhi.

MORE TOP NEWS

Language norms are constantly evolving, and this profanity expert thinks that’s pretty, ahem, neat. Dr. Timothy Jay has spent his career studying swearing — why we do it and how it satisfies us, signals meaning and offends us. Read the interview.

Lives lived: Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an independent Namibia, died at 95.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

• A dairy-based upheaval: In America, milk has been a health menace, a patriotic staple and an ethical puzzle, depending on the era — and things are about to get weirder.

• Giving back: Barbara Kingsolver is using the royalties from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Demon Copperhead,” to fund a women’s rehab center in the community that inspired the book.

• Love and money: Fewer couples are combining their bank accounts, but experts say that sharing assets can be good for your relationship.

With social media, are we all documentarians?

Scrolling Instagram Reels may seem to offer infinite variety, but it’s actually tremendously banal: brief windows into what people do with themselves all day, on repeat. We watch because we love watching humans being humans, the movie critic Alissa Wilkinson writes. That also applies to the work of the celebrated documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose films have been recently restored for retrospectives in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.

With Reels, we’re effectively watching little documentaries about human behavior. Still, Alissa writes, though we might feel like the directors of what we see, we aren’t: Ultimately, the platform is calling the shots. Read more here.