The Salvadoran Supreme Electoral Court announced on Friday that with 99.1% of the voting records scrutinized, President
Nayib Bukele
won re-election
with 84.6% of the votes.
According to the final count,
Manuel Flores
, from the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), was in second place with 6.4%, Judge Noel Orellana informed journalists at the headquarters of that court.
Maite Domínguez holds a candle next to the incumbent President Bukele.
Photo: Reuters
Joel Sánchez
of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) placed third with 5.5%;
followed by former army captain Luis Parada, from Nuestro Tiempo, with 2.3%;
Javier Renderos, from Fuerza Solidaria, with 0.7%, and Marina Murillo, from the Salvadoran Patriotic Front, with 0.6%.
According to the count,
52.1% of Salvadorans
eligible to vote in the country and abroad
voted.
The rest did not go to the polls or vote online.
Bukele's victory confirmed the predictions of all the polls, including that of the José Simeón Cañas University (UCA), run by Jesuits, in which Nuevas Ideas appeared with 81.1% of voting intention.
Second term
This will be the second
five-year
term for Bukele, who in 2019 won in the first round, beating a coalition of right-wing parties.
He will assume the new mandate on
June 1.
The Salvadoran president, who enjoys high popularity, based his campaign on the fight against the feared gangs and warned Salvadorans that if his party did not win the presidential and legislative elections, the war
against these criminal organizations
would be at risk .
This will be the second five-year term for Bukele, who won in the first round in 2019.
Photo: Reuters
Despite the constant questioning of his candidacy by political parties and human rights organizations - for contravening the constitutional prohibition that prevents immediate re-election -
Bukele managed to have the justice system enable his candidacy.
On Sunday, shortly after the closing of the vote and in an event that gathered thousands of his followers in the Plaza Cívica in the historic center of San Salvador, Bukele proclaimed himself the winner and said that he
had broken “all the records
of all the democracies in the whole story” despite the fact that there were still no official results.
“Never has a project won with the number of votes we have won this day.
It is literally the highest percentage in all of history,” he added from the balcony of the National Palace accompanied by his wife.
Bukele also said that Nuevas Ideas had won 58 of the 60 deputies in the Legislative Assembly, a key point to maintain the emergency regime and its security policy focused on combating gangs.
It is expected that in the next few hours the Electoral Tribunal will begin the final scrutiny of the election of deputies.
The confirmation of Bukele's victory was complicated because
the transmission system failed
, which only allowed 6,015 minutes of the presidential election to be digitized, leaving 2,547 pending.
The Court ordered that a final count be initiated to review all the minutes and count vote by vote.
Bukele became
a political phenomenon
for his security policy.
Two years after implementing his tough regime against gangs,
more than 76,000 people remain incarcerated,
most
without a sentence against them.
National and international organizations have questioned Bukele about human rights abuses, but the president accuses them of defending criminals who controlled much of the territory for more than three decades.