Confusion reigns again on another of El Salvador's election nights. It is clear that Nayib Bukele's party and its allies have won this Sunday in the majority of the 44 municipalities that are at stake in these local elections, but the way of communicating it and the different versions of some adjusted results in certain localities have generated confusion. The president, who a month ago was re-elected for another five years in office, has once again gone ahead of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and has assured that the party that he created and its satellite formations have won in 43 , so the opposition has only won in one municipality.
Those parties with different acronyms that support the Government have defeated Nuevas Ideas in their fiefdoms, but Bukele makes those victories his own. This has happened, for example, with the GANA party in Libertad Costa, where the use of bitcoin has been tested with tourists who go surfing. In any case, the electoral authority continued tonight with the counting of votes on a day that has not had much influx; it is estimated that participation has been low. The presidential elections also did not have the effervescence typical of campaigns in which power is truly disputed. Bukele's victories are so clear that there is no room for uncertainty.
Election observers have denounced the obstacles that journalists have faced in covering this election day, nothing new in a country in which its president attacks the media on a daily basis. Former Panamanian Foreign Minister Isabel de Saint Malo, head of the OAS mission in El Salvador, has denounced that reporters have been expelled from the premises where the votes are counted. “The journalistic role as an observer of the process is fundamental for the transparency of the count, transmission and scrutiny,” said Saint de Malo on social networks. Pedro de Vaca, the special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the IACHR, joined these criticisms and stressed that journalism “cannot be understood as an obstruction.”
The message with which Bukele announced the results has several readings. The first is that it is permeated by the criticism of those who claim that El Salvador is sliding down an authoritarian slope. The president governs with an exceptional regime that has been approved in the last two years more than 25 times by the Legislative Assembly, which controls his party with an overwhelming majority. With this mechanism that suspends many civil liberties, he has taken the army to the streets and detained thousands of young people. To put it bluntly, he has completely put an end to the Salvadoran gangs, a criminal network that had been in place for decades. That has made Bukele enormously popular, who also controls the judiciary with judges in his own right. He has thus been able to re-elect himself for another five years although the Salvadoran Constitution expressly prohibited it. Therefore, it is not gratuitous that he proclaims his victory by saying this: “In El Salvador we live in a democracy and the decision of the people is respected.â€
Next, he acknowledges that in many municipalities people have voted for mayors who are not from their party. “This is the vote of punishment for the terrible efforts that some of them have made. For this reason, as everyone could notice, I did not speak out supporting any candidate for mayor. However, the people are wise and the new mayors belong to parties that are indisputable allies of our project,†he explained. According to his data, the FMLN, the classic left-wing party, has not won either a mayoralty or a deputy for the first time in democracy. Bukele belonged to that party, from which he broke away when he was not chosen to be a presidential candidate in 2019. Now he has wanted to erase all traces of that past by deleting tweets with quotes from Che Guevara and applause for the Government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Arena, the right, a single mayor.
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