El Salvador's Bukele re-elected as president

President Nayib Bukele, who is of Palestinian origins, secured a thumping victory in El Salvador’s elections yesterday after voters cast aside concerns about erosion of democracy to reward him for a fierce gang crackdown that transformed security in the Central American country, Reuters reported.

Provisional results this  morning show Bukele winning 83 per cent support with just over 70 per cent of the ballots counted. Bukele declared himself the winner before official results were announced, claiming to have attained more than 85 per cent of the vote.

Thousands of Bukele’s supporters clad in cyan blue and waving flags thronged San Salvador’s central square to celebrate his re-election, which the 42-year-old leader termed a “referendum” on his government.

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.

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“All together the opposition was pulverised,” 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.

New Ideas’ electoral success means Bukele will wield unprecedented power and be able to overhaul El Salvador’s constitution, which his opponents fear will result in scrapping of term limits.

Wildly popular, Bukele has campaigned on the success of his security strategy under which authorities suspended civil liberties to arrest more than 75,000 Salvadorans without charges. The detentions led to a sharp decline in nationwide murder rates and fundamentally altered a country of 6.3 million people that was once among the world’s most dangerous.

But some analysts have said the mass incarceration of one per cent of the population is not sustainable long-term.

Bukele earlier told a press conference his party needed all the support it could muster to maintain its anti-gang fight and continue reshaping El Salvador.

El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal last year permitted him to run for a second term even though the country’s constitution prohibits it. Opponents fear Bukele will seek to rule for life, following President Daniel Ortega from next-door Nicaragua.

When asked on Sunday by reporters if he planned to reform the constitution to include indefinite re-election, Bukele said he “didn’t think a constitutional reform would be necessary,” but did not directly answer questions on whether he would try to run for a third term.

Bukele’s biggest challenge in his second term is likely to be the economy, Central America’s slowest growing during his time in power. More than a quarter of Salvadorans live in poverty.

Extreme poverty has doubled and private investment has tumbled under Bukele.

Who is Nayib Bukele?

A former mayor of capital San Salvador, Bukele is of Palestinian descent. His father was a prominent businessman and a local imam.

He traces his origin back to a family that immigrated to the Central American country from Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century.

A businessman himself, Bukele served as mayor of San Salvador’s southern Nuevo Cuscatlan municipality in 2012. Three years later, he became the mayor of San Salvador.

In February 2018, Bukele made a trip to Israel and met with then-Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. He also laid a memorial wreath at Yad Vashem and prayed at the Buraq Wall (Western Wall).

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