Devil’s pact – Salvadorans have bartered their constitutional checks and balances for restoration of security – World Countries for Kids

El Salvador’s President NayibBukele was re-elected on February 4, 2024, despite a constitutional ban on successive terms, and his New Ideas party secured a supermajority of seats in the Legislative Assembly. Voters rewarded the incumbent for radically improving the nation’s internal security situation, ignoring that he had eroded constitutional checks and balances and crimped civil liberties in the process. Barring an extraordinary reversal of fortunes, Bukele is very well poised to hold onto power for the foreseeable future and will carry on reshaping the Salvadoran political system to serve himself.

The landslide with question marks

Mr. Bukele’s landslide triumph was a foregone conclusion: he enjoys extensive support for having drastically controlled gang violence; he has deftly cultivated a reputation as a capable and effective leader; and he ran against an opposition in absolute disarray. But, even in this context, the president’s margin of victory was astonishingly large. Official results, though dubious, show that he got 83 percent of the vote to serve a second five-year term.

In the victory speech in which he bragged about “pulverizing” the opposition, Bukele made the contentious claim that El Salvador would be the first country with “a one-party democratic system.” There will be little opposition to him and his New Ideas party. After a vote count beleaguered by irregularities, New Ideas seems to have obtained 54 seats in the country’s 60-seat unicameral Legislative Assembly. In contrast, former insurgent group-turned-political party Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and once mighty right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party were left with zero seats and two seats, respectively.

Expanding New Ideas’ control over the Central American nation, the ruling party captured 27 of 44 municipalities in the March 3 municipal elections, with the rival alliance getting 16 of the remaining 17. Though no one disagrees that President Bukele won, the February electoral process was marred by logistical and technological glitches, wrongdoings and claims of fraud. The electronic system for transmitting the results of the vote partly collapsed, and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal head speculated that it may have been deliberately sabotaged.

In its preliminary report, the Organization of American States’ Electoral Observation Mission concluded that “the implementation of technology in this electoral process was not successful” while pointing out that “only 56 percent of the polling stations observed were able to complete the counting process and the transmission of results in accordance with the established procedures.” Physical ballots, materials to print the tally sheets and paper to log copies of the vote count were not there at many precincts. Some poll centre volunteers reported official computers double-logging ballots.