Guatemala president-elect targets graft

The victory of a long-shot candidate in Guatemala's recent presidential election highlights the country's need to fight corruption, with the winner's key message popular on social media.

The main campaign promise of Bernardo Arevalo, a 64-year-old sociologist and former diplomat, was to fight corruption. Ranked sixth among a crowded field in some opinion polls beforehand, he and his left-leaning Seed Movement connected with traditionally marginalized groups, like indigenous movements and young people, and tapped into rising anger over widespread corruption in just two months.

One driver of Arevalo's success was broadcasting his main messages via social media, including X — formerly Twitter — and TikTok, said Diego Morales, a political scientist in Quetzaltenango, a city about 200 kilometers from the capital Guatemala City.

"On election day, access to information motivated the cast of voters, mostly young people, who were inclined to vote for the proposal of the Seed Movement, a party that identifies itself as socially democratic in the words of today's president Arevalo," Morales told China Daily.

"The electoral process in Guatemala this year was characterized for being atypical," he added, pointing out that null or invalid votes accounted for 17.3 percent of all ballots cast during the first round of elections, the biggest single percentage of votes.

"The results of the first round, where the null vote was imposed… reflects the weariness of the population with the political class that does not meet the needs of the population, a situation that the Seed Movement was able to channel very well in the second round against the (National Unity of Hope party) and its candidate Sandra Torres," Morales said.

Arevalo's focus on fighting corruption set him apart from the other candidates.

However, Arevalo "faces headwinds" in the upcoming transition of power, a report by biweekly Belize newspaper Amandala said.

Ricardo Barreno, a political analyst at the nonprofit Guatemala Visible, said Arevalo's governability will depend on the support he receives from the legislature and at the municipal level.

"The immediate way to achieve governability is to negotiate within a framework of transparency and efficiency," Barreno said. "The president-elect will have to do his utmost in negotiations, and an open-door government will be key."

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.