Arévalo upsets political establishment and wins in Guatemala

Bernardo Arévalo at a polling station on Sunday. Photo: BArevalodeLeon/X.com

Left-wing former diplomat Bernardo Arévalo won the presidential runoff election in Guatemala by a landslide, in a stunning rebuke to the country’s political establishment.

With over 98 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Arévalo had 58 percent of the vote, over 20 points ahead of former First Lady Sandra Torres, an on-and-off ally of outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei. The results are expected to be made official in the coming days.

The leader of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement), a political party founded only six years ago, Mr. Arévalo is the son of former left-wing President Juan José Arévalo, known for enacting a strong progressive agenda later overturned by a coup in 1954, including a mandatory minimum wage and a stronger welfare state.

His win caps what was a chaotic electoral season in Guatemala, which included the controversial exclusion of four candidates, as well as a massive judicial crisis and “severe violations” of human rights, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The president-elect himself risked being pushed out of the race. After a surprise first-round performance that earned him a place in the runoff, Mr. Arévalo saw his party suspended.

The suspension was based on a series of forged signatures on the party’s registration reports filed more than a year ago, but Movimiento Semilla argued that it had already discovered and denounced these irregularities in the past.

Beyond the technicalities, the suspension had all the hallmarks of an arbitrary power play, given that four other rival candidates had already been banned from Guatemala’s electoral race this year — most of them critical of Mr. Giammattei’s authoritarian government.

Courts lifted the suspension, but uncertainty remained in a country where the government has used its power to tip the scales in favor of its allies. Mr. Giammattei, however, congratulated the president-elect and invited him to organize an “orderly” transition of power.

Mr. Arévalo said on Sunday that his priority will be to halt “political persecution against different types of government employees, and people focusing on corruption, human rights, and the environment.”