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Two centre-left candidates will vie for Guatemala’s presidency in an August runoff after an election tainted by the exclusion of four candidates and high levels of spoilt ballots failed to produce a clear winner in Central America’s biggest economy.
With 98 per cent of votes from Sunday’s election counted, official results showed former first lady Sandra Torres in the lead with 15.8 per cent of the vote, followed by former diplomat Bernardo Arévalo, the son of a former leftist president, with 11.8 per cent.
Torres, 67, was running for the country’s largest party, the centre-left UNE grouping, and expressed optimism as the results came in. “We are ready to win the election and for me to be Guatemala’s first female president,” she told a news conference.
Pre-election polls had suggested Arévalo, leader of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) party formed six years ago, had no chance of making the runoff. “We didn’t come to win the polls. We came to win the elections,” Arévalo said in a post on Twitter early on Monday. “We are doing well.”
None of the remaining 20 candidates reached even 8 per cent of the vote in a fragmented election marked by high levels of voter mistrust. Fewer than half of Guatemala’s 9.4mn voters cast a valid ballot, with 40 per cent abstaining and nearly a quarter of ballots being blank or spoilt.
Conservative president Alejandro Giammattei, whose approval rating hovers around 26 per cent, is constitutionally barred from seeking re-election. The US imposed sanctions on his attorney-general last year over accusations of “significant corruption”.
Arévalo had presented himself as a “decent and credible” alternative for voters tired of what is widely seen as a system rigged to minimise the chance of meaningful reforms. He has pledged to make the fight against corruption a top priority if elected.
Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said Torres’s first place was expected because of her command of Guatemala’s largest political machine but Arévalo’s success was a “total surprise”.
“It’s a sign that no matter how hard established interests tried, they haven’t been able to suppress Guatemalans’ desire to rid themselves of an often-venal, predatory and corrupt political class,” he added. “Arévalo and Semilla will now have the chance to make themselves known to a much broader public.”
The US and EU had both criticised the barring of candidates by an electoral tribunal accused of making politicised decisions. Carlos Pineda, a businessman who was an early frontrunner before being disqualified, had urged his supporters to spoil their ballots.
Guatemala has tried to consolidate democracy since the end of a 36-year civil war in 1996 but critics say the quality of government has deteriorated sharply since a UN-backed anti-corruption commission was pushed out of the country in 2019.
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 best-known journalists.
Torres is making her third bid for the presidency after a runoff defeat to Giammattei in 2019. She is associated with the social programmes introduced by her then husband, President Álvaro Colom, in 2008-12. She was charged in 2019 with campaign finance irregularities and illicit association but the case was later dropped.
Analysts have said Torres will have to contend with high rates of rejection in the second round, with one April poll showing more than 34 per cent saying they would never vote for her.
Guatemala’s economy has been relatively stable and grew above the regional average in 2022, but high levels of inequality persist, with about half the population living in poverty. More than 230,000 Guatemalans were found crossing the US border illegally by patrols in both 2021 and 2022.
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