El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele set for encore
SAN SALVADOR — Incumbent Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced on Sunday that he had won the presidential election with more than 85 percent of votes.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Bukele celebrated his election victory and said his party, New Ideas, was set to win 58 of the 60 congressional seats that were up for grabs.
Thousands of Bukele’s supporters clad in cyan blue and waving flags thronged San Salvador’s central square to celebrate his reelection, which the 42-year-old leader termed a “referendum” on his government.
“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.
Wildly popular, Bukele has campaigned on the success of his security strategy under which authorities arrested more than 75,000 Salvadorans. 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.
Hours earlier, Bukele held a news 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.
Polls showed most voters wanted to reward Bukele for decimating the crime groups.
Candidates for FMLN and ARENA, two parties that rotated power between them until 2019, were set to receive single-digit support as voters once again rejected traditional parties whose rule was marked by violence and corruption for decades.
Bukele came to power in 2019 trouncing traditional parties with a vow to eliminate gang violence and rejuvenate a stagnant economy.
The Chinese embassy in San Salvador in a post on X congratulated Bukele and his party “for the historic victory in these elections”.