As it was widely expected, the President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was reelected in a landslide, with somewhere around the 85% of the votes, and electing almost all legislative seats.
Sure enough, the world’s globalist MSM is displeased that he changed or otherwise bypassed the country’s constitution to remain in power and favor his political party.
But the opinion of Salvadorans was just expressed in the polls, and it couldn’t be more emphatic: they wanted to reward Bukele for his fierce dismantling of the criminal gangs, and keep him doing his work.
After all, the national homicide rate has dramatically plunged from 51 per 100,000 in 2018, to just three last year.
Bukeles ‘thumping victory’ in El Salvador’s elections led to thousands of Bukele’s supporters, clad in cyan blue and waving flags, to pack San Salvador’s central square to celebrate his re-election – which the he called a ‘referendum’ on his government.
Reuters reported:
“Bukele declared himself the winner before official results were announced, claiming to have attained more than 85% of the vote. Provisional results showed Bukele winning 83% support with 31% of the ballots counted.
His New Ideas party is expected to win almost all of the 60 seats in the legislative body, tightening its grip on the country and bestowing even more sway on Bukele, the most powerful leader in El Salvador’s modern history.
‘All together the opposition was pulverized,” Bukele, standing with his wife on the balcony of the National Palace, told his supporters. “El Salvador went from being the most unsafe (country) to the safest. Now in these next five years, wait to see what we are going to do’, Bukele added.”
Nayib Bukele reelected in a landslide in El Salvador. Fireworks fill the sky to celebrate the moment pic.twitter.com/B5BUP0rYNL
— Paul Serran (@paul_serran) February 5, 2024
Bukele will wield unprecedented power, will be able to overhaul El Salvador’s constitution, maybe even scrapping of term limits.
More than 75,000 Salvadorans connected to gangs have been without charges.
The detentions led to a sharp decline in nationwide murder rates and altered the world’s most dangerous country.
“Hours earlier, bullish Bukele held a press conference and said his party needed all the support it could muster to maintain its anti-gang fight and continue reshaping El Salvador. ‘So, if we have already overcome our cancer, with metastases that were the gangs, now we only have to recover and be the person we always wanted to be’, said Bukele.
Few doubted the outcome of the elections. Polls showed most voters wanted to reward Bukele for decimating the crime groups that made life intolerable in El Salvador and fueled waves of migration to the United States.”
Bukele’s challenge in his second term will be the economy. El Salvador has been Central America’s slowest growing country during his time in power.
The Economist reported:
“Before any official results were announced, Nayib Bukele claimed to have won at least 85% of the vote. He called this “the record in the entire democratic history of the world” in a speech from the presidential palace that evening.
Mr Bukele has indeed won a landslide victory. With 31% of the votes tallied, he had 83%. His party, New Ideas, is on course to capture nearly all of the 60 seats in the slimmed-down national legislature, up from 56 of 84 in the old one.”
Once weighed against his impressive security achievements, the breach of constitutional precedent was deemed a fairly minor concern.
“Before he took office in 2019, Salvadoreans lived in terror of gangsters, who extorted money from local businesses with impunity and fought deadly turf wars with each other. Mr Bukele first tried negotiating with the gangs and then switched to a mano dura (iron fist) approach. He let the police arrest anyone they suspected of gang ties. More than 74,000 people—equivalent to over 8% of the young male population—have been locked up. Few have had trials yet, though they may eventually get ‘collective’ ones, with hundreds of suspects judged simultaneously.
[…] A state of exception (ie, emergency) to fight crime was first declared in March 2022 and has since been renewed 22 times. Mr Bukele asked voters to give him a super-majority in the assembly so he can keep renewing it, which they did.”
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