Salvadorans voted this Sunday in elections for president, vice president and all 60 seats in the country’s unicameral legislature.
As was widely expected, Nayib Bukele, the president since 2019, said he had won in a landslide victory.
In a post on the social media site X, Bukele said he had won more than 85% of votes, saying it was a “record in the entire democratic history of the world.”
The win was expected despite a constitutional ban on presidents serving consecutive terms. Bukele said his party, Nuevas Ideas, had taken at least 58 of the Legislative Assembly’s seats.
Bukele, 42, is incredibly popular in El Salvador. He’s perhaps best known for his brutal crackdown on the country’s violent and powerful gangs that had dominated public life.
The country is much safer now than just a few years ago; the murder rate has dropped steeply from a 2015 high, according to the Salvadoran government. But it has come at the cost of civil rights — tens of thousands of people have been arrested on accusations of being affiliated with gangs. The incarceration rate is now the highest in the world. And Bukele has worked to consolidate power and eliminate political opposition.
El Salvador’s ailing economy will be a major challenge for Bukele’s second term, with high public debt and the president’s investment of taxpayer money in bitcoin widely seen as a failed gambit.
Nearly 30 percent of Salvadorans lived in poverty in 2022, according to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Source: Buenos Aires Times & NPR (Feb 2024)