El Salvador's Bukele wins supermajority in Congress after painstaking vote count
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El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and his New Ideas party have won the supermajority the leader needs in Congress to govern as he pleases, electoral officials announced Monday.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and his New Ideas party have won the supermajority the leader needs in Congress to govern as he pleases, electoral officials announced Monday.
The announcement comes after a painstaking vote counting process, which has raised the hackles of electoral watchdogs and the country's weak opposition, who cite irregularities.
Bukele handily won re-election Feb. 4 with 84.7 per cent of the vote. What had remained up in the air was if Bukele's New Ideas party would be equally as successful in legislative elections. On Monday, officials announced that New Ideas won 54 seats of the 60 congressional seats. Allied parties won an additional three seats.
Despite not having the final results, the leader had already declared victory in the presidency and in the congress the night of the election, saying "El Salvador has broken all the records of all democracies in the entire history of the world."
"Never has a project won with the number of votes we have won today," Bukele said. "It is literally the highest percentage in all of history."
Now -- with the vote actually certified -- the supermajority effectively gives the self-described "world's coolest dictator" even firmer control of all three branches of government.
The 42-year-old leader is massively popular in El Salvador due to his war on the country's gangs, which resulted in a sharp drop in violence. But Bukele has also been accused of undemocratic moves, including carrying out an electoral reform that critics say stacked the vote in favour of his New Ideas party, particularly in legislative and local elections.
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