Salvadorans head to the polls in presidential and parliamentary elections that primarily contest trade-offs between safety and democracy.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — El Salvadorans head to the polls Sunday in presidential and parliamentary elections that largely pit trade-offs between safety and democracy.
With hovering approval scores and nearly no competitors, Nayib Bukele is nearly sure to hunt a second time period as president.
El Salvador’s structure prohibits reelection. Despite this, about eight in 10 voters assist Mr. Bukele, in response to 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, legal professionals 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 fully discredited by their very own corruption and incompetence. Voter turnout for his or her presidential candidates this 12 months 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.
The regime has been accused of widespread human rights abuses, however violence has additionally plummeted in a rustic that just some years in the past was referred to as one of many world’s most harmful international locations.
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 avenue vendor in as soon as gang-dominated downtown San Salvador, walks the streets fearing he might unintentionally cross from one gang’s turf to a different and face critical penalties. He mentioned he was scared. That worry has disappeared since Bukele started his crackdown.
“He wants a bit 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 12 months’s election, “the conflict on gangs will likely be in jeopardy.”
“The opposition will be capable to obtain its solely actual plan to free gang members and use them to return to energy,” he mentioned.