Guatemala's Political Parties

Prensa Libre published two interesting articles in the last few days that relate to the upcoming September elections. In the first one, Francisco Mauricio Martinez discusses the tendency for Guatemalan political parties to emerge, persist briefly, and then disappear.

La Hora 2008

When competitive elections returned to Guatemala with its founding elections of November 1985, twelve political parties competed. All twelve have subsequently disappeared. The last to disappear was the Christian Democratic Party (DCG) after the last election.


PAN Website

Today, the political party that lays claim to being the country's oldest is a party founded in 1989, the National Advancement Party (PAN). Alvaro Arzu, formerly of the PAN and now of the Unionist Party, was president of the country during the signing of the peace accords. The second oldest is the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) of General Rios Montt, a party who is most likely presenting his daughter as its presidential candidate this year.

It's quite possible, even likely, that a dozen or so of the twenty-four or -five political parties will cease to exist after the elections later this year. Both the PAN and FRG have fallen on hard times in recent years. In the congress, the PAN has seen its members switch to GANA and the Unionist Party while those of the FRG have switched to the Patriotic Party. The FRG maintains 9 seats (down from 14 at the start of the congress) and the PAN 2 seats (down from 3 at the start of the congress).

In a couple of academic articles, Omar Sanchez characterizes the Guatemalan political system as "exceptionally inchoate" (2008) so much so that it makes more sense to call it a "party nonsystem" (2009). These systems are "characterized by persistently high transfers of votes away from the main parties towards new and small parties (i.e. high extrasystemic volatility), an ever-changing constellation of parties without a stable ‘core.’" It's not just that today's winners amongst Guatemala's parties are tomorrow's losers, it's that today's winners are likely to disappear and tomorrow's winners haven't even been created yet.

It's a little too early to tell, but perhaps Guatemala is in some ways moving beyond this aspect of its party system. UNE, GANA, PP, and the FRG had the four largest legislative blocs at the beginning of the current congress and they finished 1, 3, 2, and 4 in the presidential election. GANA and UNE have formed an alliance in 2011 against the PP front runner. Perhaps we'll have a rematch of the 2008 runoff election between the UNE and PP parties. In that sense, it will be unusual for the two main political parties from the last elections to be the two main political parties in this election.

I'll try to get to the other article projecting violence in this year's election and two Wikileaks cables (one old and one new) sometime this week. Read ahead if you'd like