Voters in El Salvador appear to have given Nayib Bukele a second term as president, putting him on track for a landslide victory in an election that for many depended on granting restricted civil liberties in exchange for security in a country once terrorized by the bands.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported late on Sunday that, Once the ballots from 31% of the polling stations had been counted, Bukele had obtained 83% of the votes, well ahead of the 7% of his closest competitor.the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.
The election site updating the count crashed shortly before midnight.
After casting his vote, Bukele made it clear that he hopes the newly elected Legislative Assembly will continue to expand the special powers it has enjoyed since March 2022 to combat gangs.
Later, standing on the balcony of the National Palace, he said the country had made history.
“Why are there so many eyes on a small (Latin) American country?” he asked thousands of supporters. “They are afraid of the power of example.”
“We Salvadorans have given the example to the entire world that any problem can be solved if there is the will to do so,” he said.
On the other hand, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, declared himself the winner of the presidential elections on Sunday, when no official results of the count had yet been published and despite questions about the constitutional prohibition on immediate re-election.
In a message on a key point to maintain the exceptional regime and its tough policy against gangs.
The preliminary official results began to be published almost two hours later and from the beginning they gave a wide advantage to the president’s party, Nuevas Ideas. With 31.49% of the vote, those acronyms totaled almost 1.3 million votes, followed by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, with 110,244 votes.
“Thank you, El Salvador. “This day El Salvador has broken all the records of all democracies in the entire history of the world,” Bukele proclaimed late at night from the National Palace, to the cheers of his followers in the street. “It would be the first time in a country that there is a single party in a fully democratic system. “The entire opposition, together, would be pulverized,” he presumed, anticipating that Nuevas Ideas, its acronym, would obtain 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly, “for the moment.”
The Salvadoran president sought to renew his mandate for another five years, until 2029, and revalidate his security strategy despite criticism.
“The Salvadoran people spoke and ‘what did they say?’ That he wants to continue the path,” Bukele defended.
