The legislative and municipal elections that El Salvador will hold on Sunday are a kind of popular examination of the leadership of President Nayib Bukele, whose image was placed at the center of the ruling New Party (NI) ruling party, which would give him control of Congress. for the next three years for its shooting among the population.
The meteoric rise of NI, founded in 2018 by a movement of the president and led by one of his cousins, is closely linked to the popularity of Bukele and capitalizes on the population fed up with traditional parties.
The most recent poll conducted by the Jesuit University of Central America (UCA), published before the ban on publishing polls came into force, indicates that NI would only be a deputy to obtain an absolute majority (56).
The Salvadoran Legislative Assembly consists of 84 deputies, of whom only 43 are needed to make ordinary decisions and 56 to approve foreign debt, elect magistrates to the Supreme Court of Justice and reform the Constitution.
INFALLIBLE IMAGE?
In the more than a year and a half that the president has faced the Executive, the Salvadorans’ assessment of his leadership has remained almost untiring, according to the polls.
According to the latest survey conducted by the University Institute of Public Opinion of the UCA (Iudop), Salvadorans currently give it a score of 8.3, on a scale of 0 to 10.
In June 2020, after a year in power, it was 7.71 and 7.8 at the end of 2019.
A survey conducted by the Centro de Estudios Ciudadanos (CEC) of Francisco Gavidia University in January last year gave the president a score of 8.87, which in April 2020 was 8.7 and 8.67 in September 2020.
The Iudop poll also shows that 57.5% of the population consider Bukele’s government to be “very close” or “close”.
This sense of closeness and a still firm image could explain the fact that NI based its election campaign on the image of the president with the message that they are the “N of Nayib” party.
According to a study by Acción Ciudadana, political parties spent more than $ 12.3 million on propaganda between November 2020 and February 2021.
Of that total, NI allegedly spent $ 8.72 million, representing 71% of total propaganda spending.
THE FALL OF LEGISLATIVE BIPARTISM
After his expulsion from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN, left) in 2017, Bukele took the corruption cases associated with his former party and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena, right) as a flagship to win the 2019 presidency.
His victory put an end to the three decades of the Arena (1989-2009) and FMLN (2009-2019) governments, a phenomenon that could also occur in the Legislative Assembly by stopping the distribution of the majority of deputies between the two political institutes.
The recent history of the legislature in El Salvador has been marked by both parties, which still have a majority of deputies.
Polls indicate that Arena and FMLN could face opposition without a greater share in Congress, as the simple majority had new ideas and could eventually reach the one qualified with a union with the Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA, right), which currently has 10 deputies.
This far-right party served the president as the election vehicle after the NI registration was delayed.
The foreseeable triumph of the new ideas would mean that the president will serve the rest of his term without opposition, which experts and opponents interpret as a concentration of power.