(San Salvador) Praised by Salvadorans for his war against criminal gangs, the young head of state Nayib Bukele should be largely re-elected on Sunday in the first round of the presidential election.
The president, accused of authoritarianism, still invested in the campaign to renew his majority in parliament and be able to extend the state of emergency in force since 2022.
Elected for the first time in 2019, defeating the two parties in power (Arena, on the right, and the FMLN, heir to the Marxist guerrillas) since the end of the civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992), he now enjoys Unparalleled popularity, with 90% favorable opinions, according to Latinbarometro.
The opposition is in tatters. Its five candidates do not reach 5% in the latest polls.
The 6,214,399 million registered voters, including 741,094 abroad, mainly in the United States, will go to the polls from 7 a.m. local (8 a.m. Eastern) until 5 p.m. (6 p.m. of the East) in nearly 1,700 voting centers, including a huge one in the capital.
PHOTO MARVIN RECINOS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A banner in support of outgoing President Nayib Bukele
Salvadorans praise Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs”, which has placed some 75,000 criminals behind bars (around 7,000, unjustly arrested, have been exonerated), transforming, according to him, El Salvador into “the safest country in the world”. world “.
The homicide rate was reduced to 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023 compared to 106.3 in 2015, then one of the highest in the world outside of periods of conflict. The extortion on which these local criminal gangs, the maras, lived, has disappeared.
Murders attributable to the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs increased from more than 800 in 2019 to 57 last year, according to the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled).
“He cleaned (the country) of gangs and delinquency, which no one dared to imagine. Today we feel safe going to certain neighborhoods where we haven’t been for years,” Claudia De Velasco, a 72-year-old retired architect, told AFP.
“Irreversible”
To be able to decide alone on the continuation of his security policy, Nayib Bukele, 42, called on his fellow citizens to confirm during the concurrent legislative elections the majority of his Nuevas ideas party in the Assembly, of which he is reducing the number of parliamentarians.
“Our country has changed, no one can deny it, but our task, this Sunday, is to guarantee that these changes will be definitive,” he said in a video published on social networks, where he has 5.8 million subscribers on
“We have already defeated bipartisanship, we already have governance. Now let’s make this path irreversible” and “show the whole world that Salvadorans support this project,” he added.
Former mayor of San Salvador (2015-2018) who entered politics in 2012, Nayib Bukele began his conquest of total power by replacing the judges of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court and the attorney general of El Salvador. He thus managed to circumvent the Constitution, which only allows one presidential term, by being granted six months’ leave before the vote.
Bukele, who now concentrates all the powers, readily calls himself a “cool dictator” to deride his detractors who accuse him of authoritarianism with his state of emergency in progress for 22 months and an omnipresent army in the streets.
PHOTO MARVIN RECINOS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A mural depicting President Bukele, who calls himself a “cool dictator.”
Arrests without a judicial warrant and the construction of a high-security mega-prison with very strict detention conditions are accompanied by allegations of widespread human rights violations.
Once his power is even more consolidated, the challenge for Nayib Bukele will be to counter the poverty which affects 29% of the population in order to dissuade the many Salvadorans who continue to emigrate to the United States in search of work.
For Christophe Ventura, research director at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) in Paris, the particular interest of this election in the smallest state of Central America “is the impact that the plebiscite will have probably benefit Bukele across a whole part of the political spectrum in Latin America, and perhaps beyond, by moving towards this type of regime […] which can be described as authoritarian populism or authoritarian liberalism.
“If Bukele wins hands down, it will strengthen this type of political trend,” he believes.