SAN SALVADOR, March 1, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Salvadorans went to the polls
Sunday to elect new lawmakers and mayors in a vote that could deliver on
President Nayib Bukele’s plans for an absolute majority in parliament.
Bukele, accused of authoritarianism by his detractors, hopes to have his
hands untied after a frustrating two years of blockages by an opposition-
controlled parliament.
Opinion polls projected victory for the New Ideas party founded by Bukele
in 2018, and the Grand Alliance for National Unity, through which he came to
power.
Long queues of voters wearing face masks amid the coronavirus pandemic
formed long before voting started, though many stations opened hours late.
The delay prompted Bukele to level accusations of wrongdoing against the
country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on Twitter.
“We told them 1,000 times that, whether through corruption or
incompetence, they would do everything wrong,” he said.
But an election observer told AFP he had seen no evidence of voter fraud.
Some 40,000 police, soldiers and international observers were deployed to
oversee the balloting, which came after the worst political violence in years
claimed two lives last month. After polls closed, the Organization of
American States described election day as peaceful.
Some 5.4 million voters were eligible to elect 84 members of the
Legislative Assembly from among 10 political parties.
A recent poll projected Bukele’s allies would take a comfortable majority
in parliament, which would give the president more power over crucial
decisions and lawmaking.
Elected in 2019 for a five-year term, Bukele, who is 39 and is of
Palestinian and Greek descent, has had trouble getting some programs approved
in a parliament dominated by two opposition parties — the rightwing Arena
and leftist FMLN.
– ‘Authoritarianism’ –
In February 2020, in a bid to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to
finance an anti-crime plan, the president ordered heavily armed police and
soldiers to storm parliament.
When lawmakers recently called for a congressional committee to declare
Bukele “mentally incapable” of governing, he denounced it as an “attempted
parliamentary coup.”
Since a peace deal in 1992 brought an end to more than a decade of civil
war, no party has won an absolute majority in parliament.
With a majority, Bukele would be able to appoint judges to the Supreme
Court and the public prosecutor’s office — institutions with which he has
clashed. Polls predict victory for Bukele backers in the vote for 262 mayors
and for El Salvador’s 20 representatives to the six-nation Central American
Parliament.
The outgoing president of El Salvador’s parliament, Mario Ponce, warned
against creeping “authoritarianism” ahead of the election, even as Bukele
broke electoral rules in campaigning for his party beyond the cutoff date.
The Catholic Church’s Episcopal Conference of El Salvador denounced pre-
election violence, which saw two FMLN activists shot dead while campaigning
in late January, days after Bukele criticized the 1992 peace accords.