This article highlights the year 2007 as a watershed in Ecuadorian politics. It underscores the fierce political and electoral battle between the radical and anti-systemic President and the established political class which led to the collapse of the nation’s precarious party system. Within this process the President maneuvered from an extreme minority position, lacking partisan support in Congress, to one of unfettered control of a fully empowered Constituent
Assembly. Whilst disaffected citizens still applaud the defeat of a highly corrupt political class, the country’s structural problems have grown even deeper. Paradoxically enough, the current problem is not the country´s cronic instability, , rather the very survival of Ecuador’s dysfunctional democracy.