By: Staff Writer
February 5, 2024
President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele handily won re-election despite not all of the votes being counted as yet.
The self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”, declared himself the winner of national elections in a landslide victory on Sunday, claiming he captured over 85% of the vote — even though electoral officials have not released any results.
Bukele, 42, a prominent candidate in El Salvador, was favoured to win another five-year term due to his successful gang crackdown and improved security, Reuters reported.
He said that his New Ideas party also secured at least 58 positions in the 60-seat legislative assembly, despite concerns about democracy erosion.
While the final result is still to confirm if he has indeed taken near-total control of the legislative assembly, there is no doubt that this was a landslide and, as he sees it, a total vindication of the controversial policies of his first term.
In fact, one of the crowd’s loudest cheers went up when he mentioned “the state of exception”, the emergency measures he introduced in March 2022 granting draconian powers to the police and military to fight El Salvador’s gangs.
The electorate roundly voted for a continuation of the security plan which has brought such a radical change to the Central American nation.
More than 75,000 people have been arrested under the policy in just under two years, but entire communities have been freed from an asphyxiating degree of gang control.
Bukele is a millennial of the we-have-to-break-things mentality, and he shuns ideology. He is a populist in a long line of Latin American populists, but with a mastery of social media, communication and publicity seldom seen before.
A look at some things he did in his first term:
In February 2020, Bukele entered the Legislative Assembly with rifle-toting soldiers after lawmakers balked at approving a security loan proposal. The symbolism of Bukele taking the seat of the chamber’s president backed by the military was powerful.
In April of that year, early in the coronavirus pandemic, police began taking violators of his stay-at-home orders to quarantine centers for up to 30 days. When the Supreme Court said that violated the Constitution. Bukele vowed to ignore the ruling and tweeted: “It is one thing to interpret the Constitution, and another very different thing to order the murder of people.” Human rights groups later said the detentions continued.
Bukele held a victory celebration in downtown San Salvador on Sunday evening with fireworks, attended by thousands of cheering supporters, but official results from the vote were delayed by multiple problems at the electoral tribunal.
That prompted concerns over a lack of certainty and transparency. “We’ve never seen a situation that affects electoral integrity like this,” said Óscar Picardo, director of the sciences institute at Francisco Gavidia University, adding that there were errors in the data published so far.
“It’s obvious that Bukele has the most votes, as the polls say, but there are a lot of irregularities in the processing.”