The people of Guatemala have just elected a complete outsider as their nation’s next president, selecting in a landslide election television comedian Jimmy Morales to represent them.
According to the Wall Street Journal, with 92 percent of votes counted, Morales won Sunday’s presidential election with 70 percent of the vote — a blowout election. His opponent former First Lady Sandra Torres lost with just 30 percent of the vote.
Morales, who is essentially the Donald Trump of Guatemala, won the election on an anti-corruption message — and by campaigning to significantly reduce Guatemalan migration to the United States. He wants to, instead of seeing his people leave Guatemala to take jobs away from Americans in the United States, see them build their own communities there. Morales won last month’s presidential elections decisively, which sent him into a runoff with Torres that wrapped with his victory on Sunday.
“There will always be migration if there is no security and no jobs” in Guatemala, Morales told Breitbart News in a recent exclusive interview while traveling to the U.S. between a rally in Hyattsville, Maryland, with Guatemalan migrants and a meeting with world banking leaders.
Morales wants to strengthen not just the economy, but the security situation in his nation.
“This is why in Guatemala we have to work to generate better working conditions and to strengthen the justice system, which will automatically help make security more efficient,” he told Breitbart News in the interview, which was conducted in person through a bilingual staffer of his. “It is not easy, but if we do not start today, much time will pass by without a solution to the migration phenomena.”
His campaign slogan in the election was “ni corrupto, ni ladrón,” which roughly translates to “neither corrupt nor a thief” or “not corrupt, not a thief.”
His election comes after a tumultuous year in Guatemalan politics, where the nation’s now former President Otto Perez Molina and his Vice President Roxana Baldetti landed in jail cells on corruption charges.
Morales said in the interview with Breitbart News in the Washington, D.C., area that his “candidacy is just part of the anti-corruption movement” that is surging worldwide. In the U.S., Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina — three GOP candidates who have never held political office before — are topping the polls in 2016’s GOP presidential primaries. On the Democratic side, outsider Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is surging in polls against establishment-backed Democratic frontrunner former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And in other nations worldwide, like in the recent British elections which saw the rise of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), there seems to be a worldwide outsider trend in international politics — something that may foreshadow what could happen in the U.S. presidential elections in 2016.
“I’m not a career politician,” Morales told Breitbart News. “I am not a traditional politician, but I am a citizen who has tried to prepare to confront a corrupt political class that steals money from the state with impunity.”
Of Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Sanders and other outsiders in the U.S., Morales said their success so fair is “evidence showing that a good sector of the population does not support traditional politicians even in the most democratic country in the world.”
“That sentiment will grow in countries like Guatemala where acts of corruption are brazen and remain unpunished,” Morales told Breitbart News.
Morales also told Breitbart News he believes that right now it is better for many Guatemalans to risk mass migration through Mexico to the United States — either legally or illegally — but he believes that is something that can and must change.
“For people it is better to go to the United States because they have better economic opportunities there, but socially it is a problem because they have to abandon family, have to abandon customs, they have to abandon many things that generate personal injury and damage to the person migrating and their family,” he said. “That social problem generates problems of violence, creates problems of all kinds that affect countries, including the United States, and as a result we must seek a joint solution to the problems of migration.”
He said the reason why these problems have not been solved so far is because politicians in both Guatemala and in the United States lack the “political will” to solve them.
“There are plans and there have been plans. The problem is there is a lack of political will to put them into effect,” Morales told Breitbart News, adding that his plan “is simple.”
“Fight against corruption to have economic resources to invest in health, education, security, and infrastructure for economic development,” he said, sketching out his plan to end mass migration to the U.S.
Because worldwide political trends are often contagious, the outcome of Guatemala’s presidential election could have a serious effect on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Trump, the consummate outsider who’s also like Morales a television personality, has been atop U.S. presidential polls in the GOP primary for more than 100 days so far with less than 100 days to go until the Iowa caucuses. Carson, another outsider and cultural personality, is nipping at his heels with hardly any other presidential candidate on the GOP side anywhere near either of them in polling. On the other side of the election, Clinton is almost certain to win the Democratic nomination — meaning that whoever wins the GOP nomination will be facing off against a former First Lady of the United States. Who’s to say a television personality in the United States can’t beat a former First Lady in a general election here, just like what happened in Guatemala?
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