Bukele has already celebrated his spectacular victory

Nayib Bukele, surrounded by hundreds of followers, arrived at the polling station set up on Olympic Avenue. He smiled like the man who sings the song of his victory before the elections open. If the 6.2 million citizens able to vote (740,000 of them abroad) knew anything, it’s this The result was already written. Bukele, champion of the Iron Fist, the arm that has implemented a brutal policy against crime that has jailed 71,000 people, completed his electoral process and once again congratulated those who declared him the born winner of the contest. Experienced it as. In fact re-elected President.

International observers detected “relatively normal development“The ‘normality’ of the electoral process was also marked by general acceptance of the facts. Pre-election polls gave the President an overwhelming lead over the other five competing parties. Manuel ‘Chino’ Flores of the leftist Frente National Liberation (FMLN ) for Farabundo Martí, Bukele’s immediate follower in the polls, appeared to be leading by 75 points.

Elections marked with the symbol institutional mismatch, El Salvadoran law does not contemplate a second consecutive term. But Bukele managed to get a Constitutional Court to support his aspirations. On Sunday night, at the age of 42 and after starting out politically on the left (FMLN), leaning towards the center and jumping to the right, he will create a model of a country in his own image and likeness.

dreams of eternity

That same Sunday the magnitude of his victory was so expected that the head of the New Ideas bench, Deputy Christian Guevara, predicted the end of opposition parties in the legislature. Félix Ulloa, the current vice president and Bukele’s current partner, was more adventurous in front of the Univision cameras. he talked about a Re-election of a new President in four years, Contrary to institutional legitimacy. ,Nothing is written in stone in politics, everything is possible,

‘El Diario de Hoy’ warned about the “dictatorial” daydreams of bucelism. He said, the danger signal was raised by Ulloa himself in statements given to ‘The New York Times’. “For those who say so we are destroying democracyI answer: Yes, but we’re not dismantling it, we’re dismantling it, we’re replacing it with something new.”

Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process Foundation (DPLF), who arrived in the country as an election observer, did not ignore these opinions. “I have to warn them (Salvadorans) that there is no experience in the world where a government with all powers has been successful. The danger is that there is only one party,

Security as a winning card

According to observers, there was a heavy military presence on the streets and at polling stations on election day. El Salvador is really militarized, On March 27, 2022, Bukele made a deal with criminal gangs and after 72 hours it escalated into full-scale war, leaving 87 people dead. The murder rate, which stood at 106.3 fatal cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, fell to 2.4 in 2023. Even children had to go to jail in the fight against gangs. is a small Central American country 42.7% poor and 1.7% of the population in jail. Human rights organizations have filed thousands of complaints about arbitrary detention, torture, and other crimes committed by state forces. Bukele is not impressed by these complaints.