[News] El Salvador President Bukele poised for a landslide as voters cast ballots

[MehrezVM]

 

Salvadorans voted on Sunday in elections expected to hand President Nayib Bukele another landslide victory, with many happy to overlook the young leader's authoritarian drift after he crushed gang violence that had paralyzed life in the poor Central American country.

Bukele, 42, appears poised to become the first Salvadoran president in almost a century to be re-elected.

Wildly po[CENSORED]r, Bukele has campaigned on the success of his security strategy under which authorities suspended civil liberties to arrest more than 75,000 Salvadorans without charges. The detentions led to a sharp decline in nationwide murder rates and transformed a country of 6.3 million people that was once among the world's most dangerous.

But some analysts have said the mass incarceration of 1% of the po[CENSORED]tion is not a sustainable long-term strategy.

Five other presidential candidates are contesting the elections, including politicians from the former leftist guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). These two traditional parties between them governed for 30 years until 2019.

Polls show most voters appear set to reward Bukele for decimating the crime groups that made life intolerable in El Salvador and fueled waves of migration to the United States.

Victor Lopez, a 65-year-old construction worker, was among the first 10 people lined up at a voting center on one of the capital San Salvador's main avenues.

"We have to continue the changes that are happening in our country - positive changes. We have no crime, tourism has skyrocketed and other positive things," Lopez told Reuters.

"We cannot let the corrupt people from before have power again because then the projects that the government is executing could not be executed," Lopez added.

Pre-election polling put support in the single digits for the FMLN and ARENA candidates, with voters fed up after decades of traditional politics marked by violence and corruption.

Voting centers were plastered with Bukele's New Ideas cyan blue, with supporters wearing celestial Nayib t-shirts. There was very little presence of support for the opposition.

"The country has changed so much, we don't want it to fall into the hands of the past, so I'm happy to vote for him," said Roberto Hernandez, a 46-year-old accountant in the capital. "The opposition is where it is because of his actions."

He dismissed concerns about authoritarianism, but said Bukele needs to address the economy in a second term.

 

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