The Vote for the Guatemalan Congress

On September 11, Guatemalans will also go to the polls to elect its 158-member Congress. Voters mark two ballots in order to elect members of congress - one for the national list and one for the department in which they live. There are 31 seats available from the national list and another 127 seats from the country's departments and Guatemala City.

Here is what the composition of the congress looked like since September 2007 and as of today..

In Vox Latina and Siglo XXI's most recent survey, respondents were asked for which political party they would vote in the upcoming elections. Here's the breakdown in the likely vote for each party.

• PP - 21.2%
• UNE-GANA - 11.2%
• CREO - 7.1%
• Lider - 5.9%
• Viva - 5.3%
• UCN - 1.7%
• Unionista - 0.9%
• PAN - 0.5%
• ADN - 0.3%
• Winaq - 0.2%

One of the interesting things for me here is that the PP only gets 21% of the vote even though 40% of the public is likely to support its presidential candidate. I'm not sure if that speaks more highly of its candidate or poorly of the overall party.

Given the support for each party, the folks at Siglo XXI then distributed the 31 seats from the national list to the winning parties using the D'Hondt method.

• PP - 13
• UNE-GANA -7
• CREO - 4
• Lider - 3
• Viva - 3
• UCN - 1
• Unionista - 0 
• PAN - 0 
• ADN - 0
• Winaq - 0

Otto Perez Molina's Patriotic Party is likely to pick up an addition 13 seats in addition to whatever they win at the department level. Alvaro Colom's party and its ally are likely to pick up 7. 

In order for some of the smaller parties to win their remainder seats from the national list (Lider, Viva, UCN), they'll either have to win a seat outright from any single department or attain at least 4% of the national vote. Somewhat disappointingly, the Unionista, PAN, ADN and Winaq (Frente Amplio) aren't likely to win a seat from the national list even if they somehow attain 4% of the vote or win a department seat outright. 

Now these numbers are just estimates so I wouldn't get too worked up about these numbers. Forty-six percent of those surveyed said that they would not vote for any of the parties listed. These people may or may not vote on election day. 

The candidates for UNE-GANA and Viva-EG are, as of today, not on the ballot. If their candidates don't appear on the ballot, I would venture to guess that their supporters will either stay home or vote for parties other than the PP. That's likely to help the smaller, leftist political parties like the Frente Amplio / Winaq. 

Plus we don't really have a good idea as to how each party is going to do in each department. These 31 seats only come from the national list. Another 127 seats have to come from each department's vote. Given that six parties performed well enough to pick up these remainder seats, I would say that that extreme fragmentation in the Guatemalan congress is not likely to go away in the next few months.