Guatemalan voters turned out in large numbers yesterday to elect Bernardo Arevalo as their president. Arevalo’s victory is a chance for positive change in Guatemala, but it’s still a troubling sign that traditional parties and systems are failing in the region.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Southeast Asia seemed to offer a model for democratization for other developing countries. But today the region is a long way from that promising period, with the state of democracy in dire shape. It seemed by 2020 that things couldn’t get worse. And yet, in the past few years, they have.