Nayib Bukele won the election for president on Sunday El Salvador claimedd. Although not all votes have been counted yet, he appears to be heading for a sizeable majority. On Monday morning, 31 percent of the votes were counted, of which 83 percent went to Bukele and his Nueva Ideas (New Ideas) party, international news agencies report. Bukele celebrated his expected victory on Sunday evening on the balcony of the National Palace in the capital San Salvador, from where he waved to supporters.
Many Salvadorians praise the 42-year-old Bukele for the calm he brought to the country. A civil war raged between 1979 and 1992, and after that the murder rate due to gang violence remained exceptionally high. Before Bukele came to power in 2019 and declared a state of emergency in 2022, the country had an estimated 120,000 gang members. It is currently estimated that about half of them are incarcerated. The number of murders has fallen sharply, there is less extortion and more and more international tourists are coming to El Salvador.
The fact that Bukele used unconstitutional or anti-legal means to achieve his goals does not seem to be an obstacle for many voters. Human rights organizations are critical of the way alleged gang members were arrested: thousands of people are allegedly wrongfully detained and do not receive a fair trial. The president also spent 2021 The Economist baptized “millennial dictator”, since his first election in 2019 the judiciary has been fully under his control. According to legal experts Bukele also went against the constitution by standing for election a second time.
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