Friday February 9, five days after the presidential election of February 4, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) finally announced the victory of Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, candidate for a second term, with 2.7 million votes (82. 66%) against barely 204,167 votes (6.25%) for his first opponent, Manuel Flores, of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN, left).
Elected for the first time in 2019, the head of state, who had already violated the Constitution prohibiting an immediate re-election of the president by presenting his candidacy, did not respect the role of the TSE either: he thus declared himself the winner on In this same message, he also assured that his party, New Ideas (New Ideas) had won 58 of the 60 parliamentary seats, retaining the qualified majority, which it has had since 2021.
However, these two ballots experienced a series of serious anomalies before, during and after the vote, which led Ruth Lopez, an expert in electoral law, to say: “We are facing widespread fraud. » For the first time since its creation during the peace accords in 1992, the TSE was unable to give a preliminary result on the evening of the presidential and legislative elections. Worse, after counting 5% of the votes for the deputies and 30% for the presidency, the dysfunctions were such that the Court preferred to no longer update its Internet page from 10 p.m. and to make it disappear at midnight. “We now know that when the results were transmitted, votes increased for a single political party: that of President Bukele. This is why the Court had to stop everything,” adds Ruth Lopez.
A series of problems
If few doubts remain about the result of the presidential election, where the exact number of votes ultimately matters little, as the very popular Nayib Bukele was sure to win with more than 50% of the votes, the same is not true. for the legislative elections, the ballots of which were still being counted on Saturday: the precise number of seats obtained depends on whether Nuevas Ideas obtains a two-thirds majority, and therefore whether the president retains control of the three powers – the qualified majority being necessary to change the composition of the Supreme Court or replace the attorney general, for example, which the Assembly rushed to do in 2021, after Nuevas Ideas and their allies won 77% of the votes.
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