The president of
El Salvador
, Nayib Bukele, proclaimed his re-election on Sunday night by winning more than 85% of the votes and is now heading to govern
practically without opposition,
since at the same time he won almost all of the seats in Congress .
In numbers, he will govern with
more than 85% of the votes and 58 of the 60 deputies
in Congress.
Nayib Bukele proclaimed his re-election on Sunday night by winning more than 85% of the votes.
Photo: AP
"El Salvador has broken all the records of all the democracies in the world," the president celebrated from the balcony of the National Palace, in the historic center of San Salvador, when greeting a crowd that cheered him in the central square.
"Not only have we won the presidency with more than 85% of the votes, but we have won the Legislative Assembly with at least 58 of 60 deputies," he stated, causing a burst of fireworks.
"The opposition was pulverized"
"The opposition was pulverized," he shot.
Bukele, a 42-year-old former publicist
of Palestinian descent,
praised his anti-gang "war" that turned the "most dangerous country in the world" into the "safest in the Western Hemisphere," with 2.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023.
Bukele greets the crowd from the presidential palace.
Photo: AP
"El Salvador had metastases, but we performed surgery, we are undergoing radiotherapy, and we are going to come out healthy without the gang cancer," he had said earlier in a press conference.
The president, who was already congratulated by the governments of China, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama,
defended the emergency regime
that he imposed in March 2022 and which totals almost
76,000 detainees.
"They say that Salvadorans do not want the emergency regime, that they live in fear (...) The Salvadoran people
spoke loud and clear
and in the most forceful way," he said.
The characteristic of the new mandate
The crossroads of what the Bukele model means for El Salvador and for the planet moves to a new phase.
The
concentration of power
of the president will be the characteristic that determines the next term and the fragile position of the counterpowers, with not only an Executive and Legislative controlled by him, a judiciary that in large part also and
an official press that begins to invade it all.
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.
Opposition complaints
The leftist FMLN opposition leader Manuel “el Chino” Flores, who came second with support of between 3% and 4%, according to estimates, told RFI that
the campaign was unfairly monopolized by the media by the ruling party.
“How many television spots did he give us?
Zero.
How many radial spaces?
Zero.
They suffocated us economically.
Everyone fell.
They did not give us the political debt that is the law of the republic.
The ministers drive there with state cars.
"Why don't they use theirs during election times?" denounced the opponent.
Bukele
will begin his new mandate on June 1
with the question of whether, in the long term, he can persist in
a state of emergency model
renewed up to
22 times
that has resulted in arbitrary arrests and more than 200 deaths in prison since It started in March 2022.
The people dance
Thousands of supporters shouted, danced and played their rudimentary musical instruments to celebrate the president's triumph in front of the National Palace, flanked by the cathedral and a modern library built with a donation from China.
Thousands of supporters shouted and danced to celebrate the victory.
Photo: AP
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has not yet given a percentage, but on its website Bukele's party
, Nuevas Ideas
, appears with 1.3 million of 1.6 million valid votes, which gives 83%, when counted. 31.49% of the voting records.
None of the five opposition candidates, including the leftist Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN), Manuel Flores, and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), Joel Sánchez, achieved more than 7%.
"It would be the first time that a single-party system exists in a democracy," said Bukele.
The president,
a millennial regular on social media,
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 bipartisanship, which did not resolve the problems. problems of insecurity and poverty.
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 vital remittances of 8 billion dollars annually.
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."
With information from agencies and RFI