“The big winner”: why no-vote voting was the most popular option in the first round of Guatemala’s presidential election

Guatemala has voted and chosen who will participate in the second round of the presidential election on August 20. Although the most voted option this Sunday, oddly enough, is neither of those two candidates.

With almost 16% of the vote, the former first lady Sandra Torres was the most elected party at the head of the National Unity of Hope (UNE), a party born a social democrat, although in recent years it has turned towards the centre-right.

The centre-left challenger Bernardo Arevalofor his part, the big surprise was when he came second with some 12% support as a candidate for the Movimiento Semilla, a party that emerged after the major protests of 2015 that led to the resignation of then president, Otto Pérez Molina.

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However, the preferred option of the Guatemalans going to the polls was the zero vote, which surpassed even Torres’s results at 17.4%.

Far from being an anecdote, behind this gesture supported by nearly a million Guatemalans hides – according to analysts – a clear sign of rejection of the current political system and a general fatigue of electoral options that in Guatemala traditionally translates into stop voting for which the population considers “the least bad”.

“The Big Winner”

The option not to vote was in fact promoted by three candidates who did not take part in the election after the election authorities blocked them for technical reasons they considered arbitrary and amounted to fraud: the Conservative Carlos Pineda – which was in fact first in polls for voting intentions – the right wing Robert Arzu and the left Thelma Cabrera.

Behind his call was the very ambitious target that more than 50% of votes cast would be invalid, which since the reform of the Voters and Political Parties Act of 2016, would force a re-election.

And while the zero votes obtained were far from the stated percentage, it is enough to compare the 17.4% registered this Sunday with the 4.12% of the first round of the last 2019 election to confirm the majority support for understand this alternative.

“The invalid vote is the big winner,” says the Guatemalan political scientist Gabriel Carrera. “And yes, it partly responds to that call from some very diverse former candidates, but mainly to show rejection of the party system, which is precisely the origin for which the zero vote became binding in Guatemalan law a few years ago.”

However, interviewed by BBC Mundo, the Director of Public Action at Rafael Landívar University of Guatemala, rules out that this zero vote should be interpreted as “an anti-system gesture” in general.

“It’s not because of this mood recognizes democracy and its importance, to take the time to vote after analyzing the proposals and concluding that there is no one to represent you. And that is a good thing for Guatemala’s democratic institutions,” he reflects.

The Eternal High Abstinence

Some analysts also attribute the 7% blank vote and 40% abstentions this Sunday to that climate of widespread popular disenchantment over the state’s multiple allegations of corruption and fraud.

However, Carrera distinguishes the reasons behind this low participation that, in fact It is usually a constant in Guatemalan elections (abstinence in 2019 was 38% in the first round and 58% in the second).

“We can read this data more as apathy or indifference, which are caused by the Guatemalan political culture itself and the clear lack of interest in politics that has historically existed in Guatemala, especially among young people,” he says.

Surveys confirm this picture. According to the latest 2021 Political Culture/AmericasBarometer report, only 14% of Guatemalans trust the parties and less than a third (32%) trust the elections.

It also showed disturbing data for institutions, such as that only 52% support democracy and 51% would tolerate a coup “when there is a lot of corruption”.

“There is an extreme distrust on the part of the population that stems from a poor democratic political culture,” he says. Rogelio Nunez Castellano, PhD in Contemporary Latin American History and expert in political and electoral processes in the region.

“But it also stems from a breeding ground: that the Guatemalan state has always been inefficient, very poorly funded and without giving the citizen the minimum: public education and quality health care, security…,” he told BBC Mundo.

How will it affect the second round?

One of the questions now is whether the zero vote will be so present again in the second round and whether it will somehow affect the two UNE and Semilla candidates, Torres and Arévalo.

“The vote for Semilla is not only for the party itself: it is a vote against corruption. Therefore, if you want to counter the possible alliances that are emerging for Torres to reach the presidency, Arévalo must gain the confidence of those who have now voted zero and take advantage of that apathy of a good part of the population,” says Carrera.

The possible scenarios for August are many: from that zero vote being handed over to Semilla as it became an option with a chance to win that neither the polls nor many Guatemalans had on the radar, to Torres dodging his traditional “anti-vote” (the people who would rather vote for someone than her, as happened in the last two elections) thanks to the support of the conservative population, now that she is running for a more left-wing candidacy than it could still summon ghosts in Guatemala.

“Semilla simply identifies as progressive, since in the imagination of the country there is some kind of monster on the left, about being socialist or communist, and that it has been a sensitive issue since the dictatorships developed a state strategy to fight the insurgency decades ago, based on that idea of ​​a leftist enemy,” recalled Carrera.

And according to the expert, “this narrative strategy has been effective in Guatemala in recent years, also linked to the manipulation of religious discourse.”

What he believes will really define the second round will be the strategies that the two candidates will employ from now on, which will certainly involve a change of discourse, as very few expected Arévalo’s presence at this stage.

“But with regard to this Sunday’s invalid vote, although it can be taken as something negative, it should be clarified that it is good news, because it means a return of confidence in the democratic system and in the power of the vote in a country that in democratic decline in recent times,” Carrera emphasizes.

“If there is a big winner, it is the democracy of Guatemala,” tops off