Salvadoran voters elect newcomer
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Salvadorans on Sunday elected Nayib Bukele, the media-savvy former mayor of the capital, as their next president, delivering a sharp rebuke to the two parties that emerged from the country’s civil war in the 1980s and have held power ever since.
The win for Mr. Bukele, 37, who was running as an outsider, underscores the deep discredit into which the country’s traditional parties have fallen. Voters appeared to be willing to gamble on a relative newcomer to confront the country’s poverty and violence, shutting out the right- and left-wing parties that have dominated Salvadoran politics for three decades.
Mr. Bukele won almost 54 percent of the vote in preliminary results, the electoral board said, beating Carlos Calleja, a supermarket executive who was the conservative Arena Party candidate. Hugo Martinez, a former foreign minister who ran for the governing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or F.M.L.N., came in a distant third.
Mr. Bukele’s popularity was driven by a social media campaign portraying him as a reformer willing to take on the ossified political establishment.
Iraq rejects U.S. plan
Iraqi President Barham Salih on Monday rejected a plan floated by President Donald Trump that calls for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to “watch” neighboring Iran, saying the United States should not burden Iraq with its own “policy priorities.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on Sunday have added to mounting concerns among both opponents and supporters of an American troop presence in Iraq. Their fear is that the White House sees the country as a launch point to enforce Washington’s political goals in the region, rather than as a place to help Baghdad fight a persistent threat from the Islamic State.
After Mr. Trump made an unannounced visit to an air base in western Iraq in December, some Iraqi lawmakers pledged to draft a bill calling for the expulsion of American forces altogether. On Monday, several Iraqi officials and politicians said the effort to expel the U.S. forces is gaining momentum following Mr. Trump’s comments during a CBS interview.
U.S.-South Korea pact
The U.S. and South Korea have reached a preliminary agreement on the cost of keeping nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea, two State Department officials said, alleviating fears among President Donald Trump’s advisers that he could move to withdraw U.S. troops during his upcoming summit with North Korea’s leader.
Under the revised Special Measures Agreement, South Korea would boost its financial contribution to nearly $1 billion, according to a State Department official and South Korean media. South Korea had been paying about $800 million per year during the previous five-year commitment.
Mr. Trump had been pressuring South Korea to double its financial support to $1.6 billion, worrying some of his own administration officials that he might offer to withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea during his second summit with Kim Jong Un this month.