SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) – El Salvadorans head to the polls Sunday in presidential and parliamentary elections that largely revolve round tradeoffs between safety and democracy.
El Salvador’s structure prohibits reelection. Despite this, about eight in 10 voters assist Mr. Bukele, in line with a January ballot by the University of Central America. This is regardless of Mr Bukele taking steps all through his first time period to undermine the nation’s system of checks and balances, attorneys and commentators say.
But El Salvador’s conventional events of the left and proper, which created the vacuum that Bukele first stuffed in 2019, stay in disarray. The conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which have been in energy for nearly 30 years, have been utterly discredited by their very own corruption and incompetence. Voter turnout for his or her presidential candidates this yr is within the low single digits.
Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” has gained fame for his brutal crackdown on gangs, which has seen greater than 1% of the nation’s inhabitants arrested.
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The regime has been accused of widespread human rights abuses, however violence has additionally plummeted in a rustic that only a few years in the past was often called one of many world’s most harmful nations.
That’s why voters like Marleny Mena, a 55-year-old businesswoman, are keen to disregard considerations that Mr. Bukele is taking undemocratic steps to centralize energy.
Mena, a road vendor in as soon as gang-dominated downtown San Salvador, walks the streets fearing he may by chance cross from one gang’s turf to a different and face critical penalties. He mentioned he was scared. That concern has disappeared since Bukele started his crackdown.
“He wants just a little extra time. He wants the time he must proceed to enhance the nation,” Mena mentioned.
In the run-up to Sunday’s vote, Bukele didn’t attend any public marketing campaign occasions. Instead, the populist posted a easy message recorded from his sofa and plastered on social media and tv screens throughout the nation. If he and his New Ideas Party don’t win this yr’s election, “the conflict on gangs might be in jeopardy.”
“The opposition will be capable of obtain its solely actual plan to free gang members and use them to return to energy,” he mentioned.
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