Guatemala Politics Update

And whilst I was away, Guatemala went to the ballot boxes. The law here is that if no one candidate gets 50% plus one vote, then the two candidates with the highest percentage of votes, go through to a second round. And with 14 candidates, that was always most likely to happen. Thankfully for the most part, election day was a peaceful affair, and then there was a wait for the results. The three highest scoring candidates were revealed within a day or so, but votes were still being counted for a few more days. When it looked clear that he was going to lose, the candidate placed third, then made a big deal of withdrawing from the presidential race, and resigning from his party, saying that the electoral process had been suspect (although his party have been the most to blame for that!). That great British saying about 'throwing your dummy out of the pram' came to my mind, but I don´t think it would translate into spanish!

So now they´ll have the second round in late October. The two candidates remaining, one of them has come of nowhere, he´s a completely fresh face in terms of being outside of the traditional 'political class' of Guatemala, (although is well known publicly for other reasons) - but has very little political experience. The other candidate has a lot of political experience, but as seems to be the norm in Guatemala, that brings with it a history of corruption and scandals as well.  So let´s wait and see who the Guatemalan public will prefer.