Guatemala moves towards centre-left drift as anger over corruption grows

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Two centre-left candidates will compete for Guatemala’s presidency in August after four candidates in Central America’s biggest economy failed to produce a clear winner due to high levels of boycotts and bad ballots.

Together 97 percent vote Official results show former first lady Sandra Torres leading with 15.6 percent of the vote, followed by ex-diplomat Bernardo Arévalo, the left-wing president’s son, with 11.9 percent of the vote, according to Sunday’s election count.

Torres, 67, was running for the country’s largest party, the centre-left UNE group, and expressed optimism as the results came in. He said in an interview, “We are ready for him to win the election and for me to become the first female president of Guatemala.” news conference.

Pre-election polls suggested Arevalo, leader of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) party he formed six years earlier, had no chance of making a runoff. “We have not come to win elections. We have come to win the election,” Arevalo said post on twitter Monday early. “we are doing well.”

None of the remaining 20 candidates reached 8 percent of the vote in a fractured election marked by high levels of voter distrust. Fewer than half of Guatemala’s 9.4 million voters cast a valid ballot, 40 percent did not vote, and nearly a quarter of ballots were empty or spoiled.

Conservative President Alejandro Giammattei, whose approval rating hovers around 26 percent, is constitutionally barred from running for re-election. The US last year imposed sanctions on his attorney-general over “significant corruption”.

Arévalo presented himself as a “decent and credible” alternative to voters who were tired of what was widely seen as a system rigged to reduce the chances of meaningful reforms. He has promised to make the fight against corruption a top priority if elected.

Will Freeman, Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said that Torres’ first place was expected because of her command of Guatemala’s largest political machine, but that Arévalo’s success was a “complete surprise”.

“It is a sign that no matter how hard the established interests have tried, they have not been able to suppress the desire of Guatemalans to rid themselves of an often evil, predatory and corrupt political class,” he said. “Arevalo and Semilla will now have the chance to introduce themselves to a much wider public.”

Both the US and the European Union criticized the banning of candidates by electoral tribunals accused of making political decisions. Carlos Pineda, a businessman who was a frontrunner before being disqualified, urged his supporters to spoil their ballots.

Guatemala has tried to strengthen democracy since the end of a 36-year civil war in 1996, but critics say the quality of government has deteriorated since a UN-backed anti-corruption commission was pushed out of the country in 2019. declined rapidly.

Dozens of journalists and former anti-corruption officials have fled Guatemala amid a wave of criminal prosecutions, including a recent six-year sentence for money laundering against one of the country’s most famous journalists.

Torres is making her third presidential bid after losing to Giammattei in 2019. She is associated with social programs initiated by her then-husband, President Álvaro Colom in 2008–12. He was accused of campaign finance irregularities and illicit relations in 2019 but the case was later dropped.

Analysts have said Torres will face a higher rate of rejection in a second round, higher than an April poll showed 34 percent Saying they will never vote for him.

Guatemala’s economy has been relatively stable and is slated to grow above the regional average in 2022, but high levels of inequality persist, with nearly half the population living in poverty. In both 2021 and 2022, patrols found more than 230,000 Guatemalans crossing the US border illegally.