The candidate representing Giammattei’s party came in third.Īrévalo’s party, the Seed Movement, has a strong anti-corruption identity. Around 16 percent voted for Torres, and around 12 percent voted for Arévalo. Under outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, who cannot run again due to term limits, Guatemalan authorities have forced out several anti-corruption judges and prosecutors and targeted independent media with investigations that were slammed by press freedom advocates.Ī European Union election observation mission said in a preliminary statement that while the disqualifications ahead of the election “reduced genuine competition,” election day was “largely calm and well-organized.” Among those who voted, around 24 percent cast blank or spoiled ballots in deliberate protest of the options. Torres-a socially conservative centrist who has run unsuccessfully for president twice before-is firmly within this establishment. Throughout the course of the campaign, Guatemalan election authorities steadily disqualified a string of candidates who looked as though they had a shot at unseating candidates from the country’s political elite. The results were surprising for reasons beyond the polling discrepancy. In proportional terms, Arévalo’s jump was the highest of any candidate in the region during that period. To understand the scale of the upset, political scientists Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez and Lucas Perelló crunched data from all available first-round Latin American presidential elections since 2015, comparing candidates’ final preelection poll numbers to results. 20 runoff alongside Sandra Torres, who was Guatemala’s first lady from 2008 to 2011 and had long been polling in the lead. But Arévalo shot up to second on election day itself-and made an Aug. Center-left lawmaker Bernardo Arévalo, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, had ranked lowly, in eighth place in the last major poll released prior to the vote. The first round of Guatemala’s presidential election on Sunday was a shock to pollsters.
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