Former First Lady Sandra Torres conceded the race after official results showed her with about 31 percent of the vote.
Advertisement
Morales attempted politics once before with an unsuccessful run for mayor of Mixco, a town near Guatemala City. But while Morales is scoring points in the polls for being an outsider, his competitor, Senator Torres, a former first lady, hopes his political inexperience will be his downfall.
Just days before the first round of voting last month, Otto Perez Molina resigned the presidency after Congress stripped him of his presidential immunity and Guatemala’s leading lawmaker accused him of being involved in a multimillion-dollar customs fraud. Morales says he offers no magic solutions, but he has “nothing but a big heart swollen with love for this country”, the Times reports.
As many as 54 presidential hopefuls from as many parties were in the running, with opposition candidate Jude Celestin, of the Alternative League for Progress and Haitian Emancipation (LAPEH), the favorite with 33.4 percent support, according to a poll released Saturday.
Connecting with voters with tales of his humble origins and jokes from a 14-year stint on a sketch comedy show, Morales has faced criticism over fanciful policy ideas, like tagging teachers with Global Positioning System devices to make sure they show up in class. The protests began in April after the scheme involving bribery at the customs agency was unveiled by Guatemalan prosecutors and a United Nations commission that is investigating criminal networks in the country.
Jimmy also declared that his National Convergence Front (NCF) will only appoint 11 members out of all 158 seats in the next Congress. He did express his intent to rid the country of corruption and to favor limited government and lower taxes.
Jimmy Morales, a 46-year-old comedian and actor, rose to fame playing the role of a simpleton cowboy who nearly ends up becoming president.
Renewing the CICIG´s mandate “was one of the things I must regret”, Perez told Reuters on Saturday at the military prison where he is being held awaiting trial.
“With this vote you made me president”, Morales said in an announcement Sunday night. In Sunday’s presidential runoff, Morales, who boasted of his outsider status on the campaign trail, faces Sandra Torres, a businesswoman and longtime political party operative who in a previous campaign divorced former President Alvaro Colom to try to get around a rule barring presidential relatives from seeking the office.
Morales won the first-round vote with 24 percent to 20 percent for social democrat Torres.
Advertisement
Her critics accuse her of taking part in the guerrilla army that fought the Guatemalan government from 1960 to 1996, a civil war that killed a few 200,000 people – a claim she has always denied. She’s widely seen as representing Guatemala’s old political guard.
