On Sunday, President Nayib Bukele emerged victorious in El Salvador’s elections, as voters disregarded worries about democracy being undermined and rewarded him for a ruthless anti-gang campaign that revolutionised security in the Central American nation.
The 42-year-old leader of El Salvador called his re-election a “referendum” on his government, and thousands of his followers, dressed in cyan blue, flocked to San Salvador’s major square to celebrate.
Bukele claimed to have received more than 85% of the vote and declared himself the winner before the official results were made public. With 31% of the votes counted, preliminary figures revealed that Bukele had 83% of the vote.
It is anticipated that his New Ideas party would get nearly every one of the 60 seats in the legislature, strengthening its hold on power and giving Bukele, the most powerful man in El Salvador’s recent history, even more influence.
Bukele said to his supporters, while standing with his wife on the balcony of the National Palace, that “All together the opposition was pulverized.”
He went on to say, “El Salvador went from being the most unsafe (country) to the safest. Now in these next five years, wait to see what we are going to do.”
With New Ideas’ electoral triumph, Bukele will have unparalleled authority and the ability to rewrite El Salvador’s constitution—a move that his opponents believe may lead to the elimination of term limits.
Bukele, who is wildly popular, has run on the platform of his security strategy’s effectiveness, which involved suspending civil rights in order to arrest over 75,000 Salvadorans without bringing any charges. Once one of the most violent countries in the world, this 6.3 million-person nation saw a dramatic reduction in murder rates statewide as a result of the detentions.
However, other experts claim that a 1% population incarcerated in masse is not a long-term solution.
At a news conference a few hours prior, Bukele stated that his party required all the assistance it could get to keep up the battle against gangs and to keep changing El Salvador.
He said, “So, if we have already overcome our cancer, with metastases that were the gangs, now we only have to recover and be the person we always wanted to be.”
There was little dispute about the election’s result as polls showed that the majority of people supported rewarding Bukele for destroying the criminal organisations that made life in El Salvador unpleasant and encouraged waves of migrants to the US.
Candidates for the two parties that shared power until 2019—ARENA and FMLN—were expected to garner single digit support from voters who once again rejected conventional parties whose control was characterised by decades of corruption and conflict.
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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