2024-02-05 01:43:08
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, assured this Sunday that he won re-election with more than 85% of the votes and that he swept away almost the entire Congress, according to a message posted on his account on the social network Fireworks exploded in the capital.
“According to our numbers, we have won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of the 60 deputies of the Legislative Assembly,” he said on X (formerly Twitter). “The record in the entire democratic history of the world,” she added.
According to our numbers, we have won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly.
The record in the entire democratic history of the world.
See you at 9pm in front of the National Palace.
God bless El Salvador.
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 5, 2024
Shortly before, the director of the CID-Gallup polling firm, Luis Haug, revealed at a press conference an exit poll that gave him 87% voting intention.
“We are more than happy for that victory, we are going to have Bukele for five more years,” Lorena Escobar, a 38-year-old nurse, told AFP euphorically who arrived at a square in the historic center of the capital, where a massive gathering is planned. celebration.
Shortly before the polls closed at 7 pm, the president praised in a press conference his anti-gang “war” that turned the “most dangerous country in the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.”
“El Salvador had metastases, but we performed surgery, we are undergoing radiotherapy, and we are going to come out healthy without the gang cancer,” said the president, wearing a white cap, jeans and light blue shirt, the color of his New Ideas party.
After a bloody weekend in March 2022 with 87 deaths, Bukele imposed a state of emergency that totaled almost 76,000 detainees and reduced murders to historic lows (officially 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023) in what was previously the country with the highest rate of criminal violence in the world.
But organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denounce arbitrary arrests, torture and deaths in prison. Some 7,000 innocent people were freed, but many remain imprisoned without being able to contact their families.
The president defended that El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate on the planet and affirmed that all police forces make “mistakes” when detaining innocent people.
El Salvador “never had democracy.”
Bukele, a 42-year-old former publicist, with an overwhelming popularity of 90% prior to the elections, did not have any serious opponents that threatened his second term, so he asked for votes for the 60-seat Congress, where he hopes to maintain the qualified supermajority.
The president, of Palestinian descent and who mocks his critics who call him a “dictator”, controls, in addition to parliament, justice and the rest of the state apparatus.
“We are not replacing democracy, because El Salvador never had democracy, for the first time in history (it is now) that El Salvador has democracy, and I don’t say it, the people say it,” he assured.
Magistrates renewed by that Congress interpreted the Constitution in his favor and, despite re-election being prohibited, allowed him to run again, which analysts and opponents consider unconstitutional.
“I don’t think electoral reform is necessary,” Bukele, Latin America’s most popular president according to a regional poll, said of his re-election and eventual third term.
The opposition is in serious trouble. Its five candidates barely appeared in the polls, including the leftist Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN), Manuel Flores, and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), Joel Sánchez.
Bukele “will have enough time to consolidate a hegemonic party dynamic,” commented political scientist Álvaro Artiga, from the Central American University (UCA).
This millennial regular on social media, who wears jeans and a sweater, with a well-groomed beard and gelled hair, came to power in 2019 with 53% of the votes and promises of “change” to a population fed up with the Arena-FMLN two-party system that It did not solve the problems of insecurity and poverty.
“Now is our time to get ahead. Now what is coming for El Salvador is a period of prosperity because there is no longer a brake on starting a business,” studying, working or for tourism, the president said at the press conference.
29% of the 6.5 million Salvadorans living in the country are poor, according to ECLAC, and many continue to emigrate to the United States in search of work. Some 3 million live abroad and send remittances worth 8 billion dollars annually, vital for the local population.
Even with everything and despite his great popularity, the president did not manage to get Salvadorans to use the bitcoin that in 2021 he imposed as legal tender in a dollarized economy, according to him, to boost it.
With between five and seven million followers on the X networks, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook, Bukele, father of two girls, also promotes megaprojects and tourism in “the safest country in Latin America.”
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