The Americas | He’ll do

Guatemalans elect Alejandro Giammattei in a lacklustre presidential vote

He owes much of his success to the fact that his opponent is so reviled

|GUATEMALA CITY

GUATEMALANS DID not like the options before them in the presidential run-off of August 11th. But they had to make a choice.

Sandra Torres, a former first lady, was hated by those who remembered her active role in the administration of her husband, Álvaro Colom, and believed the allegations of corruption against her (she denies them all). Alejandro Giammattei, for his part, had thrice been rejected by voters in his previous designs on the presidency.

Both reached the run-off not by surfing a populist, counter-cultural movement—of the sort that brought Andrés Manuel López Obrador to power in Mexico—but rather by plodding along in a political system that seldom produces brilliant politicians. The outgoing president, Jimmy Morales, a former comedian, is a case in point.

Preliminary results on August 12th gave Mr Giammattei 58% of the vote, against 42% for Ms Torres. Her United Hope party, just about the only well-oiled machine in the country, dominated in rural areas, but she is reviled in the capital, from where Mr Giammattei hails. The election was always going to turn on how well Ms Torres’s get-out-the-vote operation in the countryside would work. With a turnout of just 42%, it seems that she failed to get it firing. For Mr Giammattei, the revulsion that Ms Torres inspires was his most potent electoral weapon.

In power, Mr Giammattei promises to crack down on crime and attract foreign investment. In a campaign Q&A, Mr Giammattei named Mahatma Gandhi as the world figure he admires the most. His tough-on-crime rhetoric on the trail, and his bloody tenure as chief of Guatemala’s prison system, suggest that he might not have fully absorbed his Indian hero’s pacifist inclinations.

Violence in Guatemala has fallen in the past decade. Its murder rate is less than half that of Baltimore. But extortion remains a common gripe. Beyond sending police with guns into violent neighbourhoods, Mr Giammattei does not seem to have much of a plan to strengthen the rule of law. He is no fan of CICIG, the international anti-corruption commission set up with the support of the UN to fortify Guatemala’s law-enforcement institutions, which has been all but dismantled by the outgoing president (its mandate expires at the end of this month). Mr Giammattei promises some social programmes for rural women and wants to build Latin America’s first high-speed train, which he says would connect “22 strategic innovation points” across the country.

It is far from clear that any of this would do much to keep Guatemalans from eyeing the United States as a preferable place to live. A safe-third-country agreement signed in July by Mr Morales with the Trump administration, in which Guatemala would become the de-facto destination for those who seek asylum at America’s southern border (excluding Mexicans and Guatemalans), is yet to evoke a clear public stance from Mr Giammattei. He will need to settle on one: keeping the politically toxic deal could hinder his honeymoon before it begins; reneging on it could invite Mr Trump’s fury, which may take the form of fees on the remittances of Guatemalan workers or sanctions on Guatemala’s political class.

It is the first of many headaches. But if being a great Guatemalan president were easy, someone would have done it by now.

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