Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala

Two Latin American countries go the polls on Sunday, and a third voted last Sunday in nationwide primaries. Here’s a quick rundown on each.

Argentina holds presidential and congressional elections in two months’ time, on 22 October. Incumbent president Alberto Fernández, elected in 2019, is eligible for re-election but has decided not to stand; his tenure has been marked by economic problems and tensions with his vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no relation), herself a former president. Instead his left-Peronist group, now called Union for the Homeland, will be represented by economy minister Sergio Massa.

Massa and the other four presidential candidates were selected on Sunday in nationwide primary elections, held simultaneously for all parties (see official results here). Since everyone gets to vote – in fact voting is nominally compulsory, although turnout was only 69.6% – the primary doesn’t just serve to choose candidates; it also gives an indication of the level of support each party has.

On that basis, Massa clearly has only two serious opponents. With 27.3% of the vote, Union for the Homeland narrowly trailed its centre-right rival, Together for Change, on 28.3%: its candidate will be former security minister Patricia Bullrich. But ahead of both of them, with 30.0%, was a new “libertarian” party, Liberty Advances, with its leader, Javier Milei. Two small parties round out the field: the right-Peronist We Do for Our Country, which had 3.8%, and the Trotskyist Workers’ Left Front with 2.7%.

As is normal in the Americas (and becoming sadly common elsewhere), the “libertarians” are pretty much indistinguishable from the far right, so the primary echoes the far right’s recent success in neighboring Chile. But whether Milei can carry that success through to the actual election remains to be seen. Opinion polls prior to the primary had consistently put him in third place, so it’s possible that some voters were using it as a protest vote rather than a sign of their real intentions.

Ecuador, which holds its first round of voting on Sunday, also has a president not seeking re-election. Back in May, Guillermo Lasso broke a deadlock with the legislature by calling simultaneous early elections, but he quickly announced that he would not be a candidate, and his centre-right party, Creating Opportunities, also decided not to stand.

Eight candidates are running to replace him, but the campaign was hit by drama last week when one of them, centrist Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated at a campaign rally. His party, Construye, has nominated Christian Zurita in his place; it’s possible that a reaction against the assassination will work in his favor, since some polls already had Villavicencio in a position to make the runoff.

The candidate to beat is leftist Luisa González (the only woman in the field), who seems assured of being in the top two. In addition to Zurita, those who might face her in the runoff include former vice-president Otto Sonnenholzner, businessman and Lasso ally Jan Topić, and indigenous activist Yaku Pérez, who ran a close third in 2021.

Finally to Guatemala, which votes on Sunday in the second round of its presidential election. In the closely contested first round, held two months ago, Sandra Torres and Bernardo Arévalo finished in the top two spots; both are nominally on the left, but Torres is much more the establishment candidate and has pitched her appeal to right-of-centre voters.

Arévalo trailed by more than five points on the first round, and since most of the eliminated candidates are to his right you would expect him to be very much the underdog. But some polling has put him in the lead, propelled by popular anger against corruption and efforts by the legal system to shut down his campaign.