Nayib Bukele claims victory in El Salvador elections

Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of El Salvador’s capital, has won a landslide victory in Sunday’s presidential election.

Bukele won more votes than all other candidates combined in his first-round sweep, highlighting deep voter frustration over the failure of the two main parties to tackle violence and corruption.

The supreme electoral court declared Bukele the winner, saying he had nearly 54% of the votes, with nearly 90% of ballots counted. Carlos Callejas of the Nationalist Republican Alliance was far behind in second with less than 32%, while even farther back were former foreign minister Hugo Martinez of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a minor party candidate.

Bukele surpassed the 50% threshold to avoid a March runoff, and he had already claimed victory before a jubilant crowd in San Salvador and invited supporters to celebrate in the streets.

“This day is historic for our country. This day El Salvador destroyed the two-party system,” Bukele told hundreds of Salvadorans who danced, waved flags and blew whistles in a San Salvador plaza that Bukele revitalized when he was mayor from 2015 to 2018.

He stood on an anti-corruption platform and campaigned on the slogan: “There’s enough money when no one steals.” There were no reports of major problems in voting.

Bukele, 37, made his political debut in 2012 as a small-town mayor with the now-ruling FMLN and won the election in the capital three years later, automatically making him a potential presidential contender. But his frequent criticism of the leftist party’s leadership led to his expulsion, and he wound up as the unlikely standard-bearer of a small conservative party known as the Grand Alliance for National Unity, whose initials –Gana – mean “win” in Spanish.

More than 4,500 election observers, including representatives of the Organization of the American States and the European Union, were on hand.

El Salvador is small both in size and population, with just 6.5 million people. Close to a third of its households live in poverty, while the World Bank says per capita income is $3,560.