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Two centre-left candidates will fight for Guatemala’s presidency in a run-off in August after an election marred by the exclusion of four candidates and a high number of invalid ballots failed to produce a clear winner in Central America’s largest economy.
Counting 98 percent of the vote on election Sunday, official results showed former first lady Sandra Torres topped the polls with 15.8 percent of the vote, followed by former diplomat Bernardo Arévalo, son of a former left-wing president, at 11 .8 percent.
Torres, 67, ran for the country’s largest political party, center-left grouping UNE, and expressed optimism when the results came in. “We are ready to win the election and for me to become Guatemala’s first female president,” she told a news conference.
Pre-election polls showed that Arévalo, leader of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) party founded six years ago, had no chance of winning the runoff. “We didn’t come here to win the polls. We came to win the elections,” Arévalo said in one post on twitter early on Monday. “We’re fine.”
None of the remaining 20 candidates garnered even 8 percent of the vote in a fragmented election marked by high levels of voter distrust. Less than half of Guatemala’s 9.4 million voters cast a valid ballot, 40 percent abstained, and almost a quarter of the ballots were blank or invalid.
Conservative President Alejandro Giammattei, whose approval rating is around 26 percent, is constitutionally barred from standing for re-election. The US imposed sanctions on its Attorney General last year over allegations of “substantial corruption”.
Arévalo had presented itself as a “decent and credible” alternative for voters tired of a system widely seen as rigged to minimize the chance of meaningful reforms. He has promised 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’ first place was expected by Guatemala’s largest political machine because of her leadership, but Arévalo’s success came as a “complete surprise”.
“It is a sign that mainstream interests have failed to quell Guatemalans’ desire to break free from 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 wider public.”
Both the US and the EU had criticized the exclusion of candidates by an electoral tribunal accused of making politicized decisions. Carlos Pineda, a businessman who was an early front-runner before his disqualification, had urged his supporters to falsify their ballots.
Guatemala has sought 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 United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission was ousted from the country in 2019.
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Torres is running for the presidency for the third time after a runoff loss to Giammattei in 2019. She is associated with the social programs introduced by her then-husband, President Álvaro Colom, in 2008–12. In 2019, she was charged with campaign finance irregularities and illegal association, but the case was later dropped.
Analysts believe Torres will face high rejection rates in the second ballot. A poll in April found more than 34 percent said they would never vote for her.
Guatemala’s economy has been relatively stable, growing above the regional average in 2022, but high levels of inequality remain, with around half of the population living in poverty. In both 2021 and 2022, more than 230,000 Guatemalans were caught illegally crossing the US border by patrols.