Bukele officially re-elected El Salvador president
San Salvador, (EFE).
El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on Friday declared Nayib Bukele the winner of the presidential election with 82.66 percent of the vote.
TSE judge Dora Martínez announced in a press conference that Bukele’s ruling Nuevas Ideas party garnered a total of 2,700,725 votes (82.66 percent), the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front obtained 204,167 (6.25 percent) and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance got 177,881 (5.44 percent).
The humanist center party Nuestro Tiempo, which participated for the first time, obtained 65,076 (1.99 percent) and the Fuerza Solidaria and Fraternidad Patriota Salvadoreña parties registered 23,473 (0.72 percent) and 19,293 (0.59 percent), respectively.
Martínez said that 6,214,399 citizens were eligible to vote and 3,268,466 voted, with a participation level of 52.60 percent. There were 15,064 abstentions (0.46 percent) and 1,760 contested votes (0.05 percent).
Shortly before the results were made official, Bukele took to social media.
“In 2019, we won the presidency in the first round, with more votes than all other parties combined. But in 2024 we won with practically all the votes of all the parties of 2019, together, including ourselves. Thank God. Thank you Salvadoran people,” the president wrote.
The message was accompanied by a graph that highlighted the enormous difference in votes with respect to his opponents.
The results show that support for Bukele increased, given that in his first presidential elections he took 1,434,856 votes – equivalent to 53.10 percent, while the two traditional parties saw their support drop.
Last Sunday night Bukele proclaimed himself the winner with more than 85 percent of the votes, while the total number of voters and the percentage of abstentionism were still known.
Bukele is the first president of El Salvador to be re-elected, despite the constitutional ban, since the country left a decades-long military dictatorship and entered democracy. EFE
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