The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has hinted that the Electoral Tribunal is committing intentional errors with the aim of damaging his party, New Ideas (NI), in the legislative elections that have been held this Sunday and in which the president he has set himself the objective of obtaining the 56 deputies that would allow him to control the Assembly.
Bukele, whose party will easily win the legislative elections, according to all the polls, has said that the electoral body has committed irregularities as a result of “error” but has accused that others, however, were intentional, in reference to the delay suffered by supervisors of his party in receiving the credentials or in the “deliberate turtle step” in front of the polls “to lower the vote.” The president has accompanied the accusations of harsh criticism of several magistrates of the Electoral Tribunal, whom he called corrupt and of operating in the service of dark interests, although he has avoided pronouncing the word fraud.
In parallel to the complaints, the Salvadoran president appeared on television, when the polls were still full of voters, to indicate to his followers the start of the “auction operation”, an old strategy already applied by Chavismo in Venezuela that seeks to mobilize in the last hours of the day to the largest number of like-minded voters. “Now that these people are going abroad, we need the people to end the 40-year-old party system that has dominated the country,” Bukele insisted from the Presidential Palace at 2:30 in the afternoon, local time.
Due to the queues, which in some places in the capital were two hours of waiting, Bukele asked voters for patience. “What is two more hours of waiting if we have had to wait 40 years to remove them from power?” Said the 39-year-old president, with his head covered by a baseball cap backwards.
Bukele’s reaction is more like an electoral strategy than a real complaint that provided minor logistical errors as the only evidence. International observers consulted by EL PAÍS or the United States charge d’affaires, Brendan O’Brien, ruled out signs of fraud. “It is very important not to say that there is fraud where there is no fraud, it is important to wait for the results,” the diplomat insisted at a press conference. Although polling stations are now officially closed, Salvadorans have the right to vote if they were in line before five in the afternoon.
The specter of fraud is one of the strategies used by the president, who accuses the Electoral Court of operating against him as it is controlled by the opposition parties of the Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN) and Arena (Republican National Alliance), clearly sunk in the electoral preferences, even with a presence in key bodies.
In these elections, Nayib Bukele is not served with winning. New Ideas and its satellite parties have set a goal of reaching 56 deputies, which would allow them to take control of the Assembly and make important appointments such as the Attorney General, a third of the judges of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General or the Comptroller of Accounts, among other bodies. Failure to reach that figure would be a failure for Bukele, who has one of the highest popularity ratings on the continent, and would force him to negotiate with other benches, an unusual job for someone accustomed to command.
Throughout Sunday large queues of voters were seen in front of schools to elect deputies, mayors and members of the Central American Parliament (Parlacem). The sanitary measures due to the covid put voters to wait in the street under the intense Salvadoran sun. The large concentrations of voters in the street made it difficult to measure the enthusiasm, rather low, aroused by legislatures of this type, which rarely exceed 53% of participation.
Under a relentless sun in the Montreal neighborhood of the capital, Rubén Osorio, a 43-year-old neighbor, asked the parties for conciliation for the new stage and thus be able to finish some of the social projects that have reached his impoverished neighborhood. “I see more illusion than on other occasions for elections to the Assembly,” he told EL PAÍS minutes after depositing the complex ballot in the cardboard ballot box.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/bukele-shakes-the-specter-of-electoral-fraud-in-el-salvador/
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