2015 Guatemalan General Election

General elections were held in Guatemala on September 06,2015 to elect the President and Vice-President, all 158 Congress Deputies, all 20 Deputies to the Central American Parliament and Mayors and Councils for all 338 Municipalities in the country.

The President of Guatemala is elected using the 2-round system

The 158 members of Congress are elected by two methods; 31 members are elected by closed list proportional representation  in a single nationwide constituency, with seats allocated using the d'Hondt Method

The other 127 seats are elected in 22 multi-member constituencies aligned with the departments

Around 7.5 million people registered for the elections. Members of the armed forces (Air Force, Army, and Navy), people in prison, and Guatemalans living abroad were not allowed to vote

Since no presidential candidate received more than 50% of the vote, a run-off is scheduled to be held on Sunday Oct 25,2015

Comedian and political neophyte Jimmy Morales was elected President of Guatemala in a landslide.

The 46-year-old conservative swept to victory on Sunday on a tide of voter outrage over a corruption scandal that felled his predecessor, Otto Perez.

“With this election you have made me President, I received a mandate and that mandate is to fight the corruption that has consumed us,” said Morales on national TV.

A comic actor and TV personality who has never held elected office, Morales now must set about governing one of Central America’s poorest countries with little to work with but high public expectations and a deep yearning for change. His conservative FCN-Nacion party holds only 11 seats in the 158-seat Congress, but Morales won 67 per cent of the vote.

An estimated 54 per cent of Guatemala’s 15.8 million people live below the poverty line of $1.50 a day, and 6,000 people a year died as a result of violence, one of the highest murder rates in Latin America. It is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996.