Centre-left Arévalo wins second round of Guatemalan presidential election
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Data from Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) indicate that the son of ex-president Bernardo Arevalo, who represents the Semilla movement, won the second round of the presidential election. After counting 85% of the ballots, Arevalo won 59% of the vote, while his rival Sandra Torres received 35% of the vote.
With 85.89% of the vote counted, Arevalo won 59.71%, while Torres, who leads the National Unity of Hope (UNE) party, received 35.6% of the vote, according to the TSE. Thus, regardless of the results, which have not yet been calculated, Arévalo will become the President of Guatemala.
None of the candidates has yet commented on the results of the vote count. The turnout in the second round of the presidential election was 44.49% of the 9.36 million registered voters.
The current President of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammatei, has been in office since January 2020 and is constitutionally ineligible for re-election. The inauguration of the new president will traditionally take place on January 14 at a solemn meeting of the new congress of the country.
The elections were held without major incidents. The only reported incident was the attack on TSE member Blanca Alfaro, who received threats. During the day, a truck loaded with polling materials overturned, and an hour before the polling station closed, unidentified individuals threw a Molotov cocktail at a polling station in Mixco. No one was hurt in this incident, and two perpetrators were detained.
Bernardo Arevalo, a 64-year-old diplomat and politician, is the son of former Guatemalan President Juan José Arevalo, who was president from 1945 to 1951. He made a career in the local Foreign Ministry in the 1980s and 1990s, worked in Israel and Spain, and served as Deputy Foreign Minister. Semilla, the progressive social democratic movement he helped found, was registered in 2017. In 2019, Arévalo withdrew from the presidential election as Semilla’s representative for personal reasons and was elected as a member of Congress.
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