El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele To Win Re-Election

El Salvador Nayib Bukele is expected to secure a second term as president with initial data showing his party receiving 87% of the votes.

There is widespread expectation that Nayib Bukele, a supporter of Bitcoin will be elected to a second term as president. Preliminary official voting data shows that his party has received 87% of the votes, but the full results have not yet been made public.

Official results from the country’s election authorities, the Supreme Election Tribunal (TSE), show that Bukele’s populist Nueva (New) Ideas party is in the lead by more than 1.1 million votes, with 31.5% of the vote tabulated as of February 5th at 5:30 a.m. UTC.

Regarding the total number of votes, New Ideas is getting closer and closer to 1.3 million, while the Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN), led by Manuel Flores, has received slightly more than 110,000 votes.

The Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), led by Joel Sánchez, has received approximately 97,000 votes. CID Gallup had previously claimed that exit surveys indicated that Nayib Bukele’s party had received 87% of the ballots, while Flores and Sanchez had received 7% and 4% of the votes, respectively.

If Nayib Bukele continues to govern, he will serve as president until 2029, completing a five-year term. Before any official results were revealed, Bukele declared his victory in an X post.

He stated that the data from his party indicates that he won the election with more than 85 percent of the votes and a minimum of 58 out of 60 deputies in the assembly.

In September 2021, Nayib Bukele’s measures to support the cryptocurrency included making Bitcoin legal tender in the country. Other initiatives supported cryptocurrency.

Vice President Félix Ulloa reportedly affirmed that Bukele’s Bitcoin policy would remain unchanged if he were elected according to a story published by Reuters on February 1st. Last week, this information came to light.

Additionally, the president of El Salvador is well-known for his efforts to punish criminal gangs. Amnesty International criticized the leadership of Bukele for an “alarming regression” in the protection of human rights, posing a risk of replacing gang violence with “state violence.”

This criticism was made the previous year. Additionally, Bukele’s candidacy for a second term has been met with disagreement and criticism. The constitution of the country, according to the arguments of several detractors including the Salvadoran attorney Alfonso Fajardo, makes it impossible for Bukele to run for a second straight term in office.

Fajardo made this statement when it became public knowledge that Nayib Bukele had submitted papers to run for re-election in October. Fajardo reminded everyone that the Constitution prohibits immediate presidential re-election up to seven times.

Gabor Gurbacs, a strategy adviser at Vaneck has suggested that El Salvador has the potential to become the “Singapore of the Americas.” Gurbacs anticipates that the country will get a greater amount of investment capital and immigration in the years to come.