Q24N – The Nuevas Ideas (NI) party of President Nayib Bukele and partner Gran Alianza Nacional (GANA) party would obtain at least 56 of the 84 seats in the Congress of El Salvador, which would give them a qualified majority and great strength to promote law proposals, reported this Monday, El Faro, which cited data from the elections board.
Preliminary figures not only confirm NI’s comfortable victory, anticipated in the reading of voting intention polls, but also the collapse of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The first would get 14 seats and the latter only 3.
Such figures emerged from the preliminary results with an 80% scrutiny disseminated in real time by the elections board.
The preliminary count allows the elections board to mark the number of votes that each political organization receives. The official count will begin on Tuesday, to know precisely how many seats will correspond to each party, informed an AFP source.
Bukele, who celebrated his “victory” on Twitter on Sunday, despite the preliminary results, shared in that network an exit poll of the Costa Rican firm Cid Gallup, which ensures that Nuevas Ideas obtained a large majority in Parliament, with more than 67% of the votes.
Although the details of the survey were not disclosed.
“Nuevas Ideas + GANA will have more than 60 deputies (…) Thanks to the Salvadoran people. Thank God,” he wrote, in a fact that no party has achieved in three decades.
The message alluded to the support that Nuevas Ideas would have from the GANA party, which served as a platform for the president to triumph in the 2019 presidential elections.
The Assembly elected on Sunday will take office on May 1. Apart from legislating, it must elect five magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice, the attorney general of the Republic and the Human Rights Ombudsman, among other positions.
If the majority is confirmed, Bukele may also promote constitutional reforms, as he had already anticipated.
With the Congress that is about to finish its work, the president maintained conflicts, given the majority held by Arena and the FLN. The clashes also occurred with the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office.
Nayib Bukele
In his first two years in office, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele marched soldiers into the country’s legislature, defied Supreme Court rulings, published photos of barely clothed gang members crammed together on a prison floor and dispatched the military to detain anyone breaking quarantine.
Salvadorans can’t get enough of him. Bukele enjoys an approval rating of around 90 percent in polls.