Elections in El Salvador: after the comfortable victory, Nayib Bukele is preparing to govern without opposition

The president of The SaviourOn Sunday evening, Nayib Bukele proclaimed his re-election by obtaining more than 85% of the votes and is now preparing to govern practically without opposition, for at the same time he won nearly all the seats in Congress.

In numbers, he will rule with more than 85% of the votes and 58 of the 60 deputies congress.

“El Salvador has broken all the records of all the democracies in the world”, celebrated the president from the balcony of the National Palace, in the historic center of San Salvador, greeting the crowd that applauded him in the central square.

“Not only did we win the presidency with more than 85% of the votes, but we also won the Legislative Assembly with at least 58 out of 60 deputies,” he declared, causing an explosion of fireworks.

“The opposition has been pulverized”

“The opposition has been pulverized,” he fired.

Bukele, a 42-year-old former publicist of Palestinian origin, praised his “war” against gangs that has transformed the “most dangerous country in the world” into the “safest in the Western Hemisphere”, with 2.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023.

“El Salvador had metastases, but we performed surgery, we are undergoing radiotherapy and we will come out healthy, without gang cancer,” he said earlier in a press conference.

The president, who has already received congratulations from the governments of China, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, defended the emergency regime which was imposed in March 2022 and which amounts to almost 76,000 prisoners

“They say that Salvadorans don’t want the emergency regime, that they live in fear (…) The Salvadoran people he 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 the planet moves into a new phase. THE concentration of power of the president will be the characteristic that will determine the next mandate and the fragile position of the counter-powers, with not only an executive and a legislative power controlled by him, a judicial power that to a large extent also and an official press that begins to invade everything.

Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch They denounce arbitrary arrests, torture and deaths in prison. Around 7,000 innocent people have been freed, but many remain imprisoned.

Opposition complaints

Left-wing opposition FMLN leader Manuel “el Chino” Flores, second with a consensus of between 3% and 4%, according to estimates, told RFI The campaign has been unfairly monopolized by the ruling party in the media.

“How many TV commercials has he given us? Zero. How many radial spaces? Zero. They suffocated us financially. Everyone fell. They did not give us the political debt which is the law of the republic. The ministers arrive there in state cars. “Why don’t they use them at election time?” denounced the opponent.

Bukele The new mandate will begin on June 1st with the question of whether, in the long term, it can persist a model of state of exception renewed until 22 occasions which has resulted in arbitrary arrests and more than 200 deaths in prison since it began in March 2022.

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.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) has not yet provided a percentage, but on its website Bukele’s partyNew ideasappears with 1.3 million valid votes out of 1.6 million, or 83%, with 31.49% of the votes examined.

None of the five opposition candidates, including the left-wing Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN), Manuel Flores, and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), Joel Sánchez, got more than 7%.

“It would be the first time there is a one-party system in a democracy,” Bukele said.

The mandatory, a millennial who is a regular on social networks, With a well-groomed beard and gelled hair, he came to power in 2019 with 53% of the votes and promises “change” to a population fed up with the Arena-FMLN bipartisanship, which has not solved the problems of insecurity and poverty.

A Twenty-nine percent of the 6.5 million Salvadorans living in the country are poor, according to CEPAL, and many continue to emigrate to the United States in search of work. Around 3 million live abroad and send vital remittances of $8 billion a year.

Despite its great popularity, the president has failed to convince Salvadorans to use bitcoin, which he imposed as legal tender in 2021 adollarized economyaccording to him, to energize him.

With between five and seven million followers on the X networks, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook, Bukele, a father of two little girls, also promotes megaprojects and tourism in the “safest country in Latin America”.