Former First Lady Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) was the most-elected candidate in Sunday’s elections in Guatemala, facing Bernardo Arévalo of the Seed Movement, a party consolidated in Guatemala’s democratic spring unexpectedly second in the preferences of Guatemalans.
With 97% of the vote counts processed, the UNE candidate, who moved from social democracy to more conservative positions, commands 15.69% of the vote, compared to 11.8% of the support of the centre-left leader of the Seed movement. Both candidates meet in the second round on August 20th. After a recount, which is being conducted manually and has been slowly progressing since the close of business at 6 p.m., the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) said around 3:30 a.m. local time that the trend was irreversible.
The rise of the seed movement in the first round this Sunday was the big surprise of the day. No poll released during the campaign showed him receiving more than 3% of the vote. These polls placed diplomat Edmond Mulet and former MP Zury Ríos, daughter of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, in second and third place, eventually finishing fifth and sixth with 6.73% and 6.58% of the vote, respectively . Ahead of them were Manuel Conde of the official Vamos party in third and fourth with 7.83% of the vote and Armando Castillo of Vivir with 7.29%.
The victory of the rejection vote
This Sunday’s elections generally showed a strong rejection of the traditional party system and the corruption that pervades various levels of the state. In fact, the majority of Guatemalans who went to the polls voted zero (17.39%), a number that exceeds the acceptance reached by Torres, while 6.9% of citizens voted blank.
After an election campaign marred by allegations of fraud following the removal of three top candidates, the three candidates were excluded from the process: Thelma Cabrera from the left-wing Movement for the Liberation of Peoples, Roberto Arzú from the right-wing. Podemos, and Carlos Pineda, a farmer with no political experience who became very popular mainly thanks to networks like TikTok, asked his followers to invalidate their vote to reject a process they considered fraudulent.
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A volunteer from the Belén Institute shows a ballot for the presidency, invalidated by a voter, which reads: “They are all thieves.” Esteban Biba (EFE)
The turnout was almost 60%, just over two points more than in the last elections of 2019, in which Alajandro Giammattei won. Of the 9.3 million Guatemalans called to vote this Sunday, 5.5 voted. Of these, more than 955,000 voted zero, more than 866,000 for Sandra Torres and almost 649,000 for Bernardo Arévalo, who ended up becoming the hopeful candidate for citizens tired of traditional parties.
His entry into the second round came as a complete surprise, even for the party itself and its supporters. Before midnight, after hours of lying in second place, Arévalo and his candidate for vice president, Karin Herrera, offered a press conference in which they interpreted the result as a sharp rejection of the way Guatemala has been conducting politics was operated now. “We believe that the electorate was fed up with the co-opted political system and was looking for a decent and credible alternative,” the candidate said at the National Information Center (CNI), based in a hotel in the capital.
“We are very happy because we are a political party. We are not a collection of people, but a party responding to one platform and one vision,” Arévalo told reporters. “We’ve always known that the polls don’t reflect what people think,” he said. Three days before the election, the polls predicted 2.9% voting intent.
Shortly thereafter, Sandra Torres also spoke to the media. “We don’t know with whom, but we are ready to win the election and that I will be the first president of Guatemala,” she said at a press conference, at which she already took her entry into the second round for granted. The former first lady also criticized the slowness of the count despite the Supreme Electoral Court’s (TSE) investment in improving the counting system.
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