The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, would win re-election and almost completely dominate Congress in the February 4 elections. This was stated this Tuesday by a survey by the private Francisco Gavidia University (UFG), which found that Bukele, with his Nuevas Ideas (NI) party, has 70.9% of voting intentions,
None of the other five candidates in competition exceed 3 percent of voting intention. Relegated with 2.9 percent is the candidate of the ex-guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN, left), former deputy Manuel Flores.
The right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), with businessman Joel Sánchez, appears with 2.7 percent, and the candidate of Nuestro Tiempo (NT, center) Luis Parada, with 1.1 percent. Two other candidates together account for 1.2 percent. 21.2 percent abstained from giving their opinion or canceled their vote.
The FMLN and ARENA dominated Salvadoran politics after the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992), until Bukele in 2019 broke that two-party system by winning the presidency.
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Bukele has 70 percent voting intention.
Bukele, despite the fact that he himself maintained in the past that immediate re-election is prohibited in the Constitution, announced in September 2022 that he will seek to remain in power in 2024.
This occurred after the Constitutional Chamber, elected by the ruling majority Congress in a questioned process after the dismissal of its predecessors, changed a 2004 criterion that stated that a president had to wait 10 years to seek the Presidency again.
Thus, on November 30, the president received a license from Congress for six months to launch the re-election campaign in the upcoming elections.
A survey conducted last December by the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) also found that seven out of 10 Salvadorans “agree” with Bukele being a candidate for re-election.
The massive popular support for Bukele is due to the fact that his “war” against criminal gangs brought tranquility to the population, but at the cost of civil rights limited by an emergency regime that has been in force since March 2022, according to human rights groups.
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In the February elections, with a registry of 6.2 million voters, Congress will also be renewed, which will have 60 deputies instead of the current 84 that the ruling party and its allies dominate, by virtue of a reform to the electoral law.
The projection, according to the survey, is that the Nuevas Ideas party would obtain 57 deputies, 2 Arena, and 1 the Christian Democratic Party.
The survey indicates that 60.7 percent of the people interviewed have little or no confidence in the work of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) ahead of this year's general elections.
AFP and EFE
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