El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele will have an absolute majority in parliament from May, with 61 of the 84 seats won by his allies following the February 28 elections, according to final results released on Friday.
Nuevas Ideas and the party of the Great National Alliance (Gana, center right), which had presented Mr. Bukele in the presidential election in 2019, obtain respectively 56 and five seats in the unicameral Parliament, according to these results made public by the Supreme Court electoral.
The right-wing opposition Arena won 14 seats and the far-left ex-guerilla of the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation won four. Several small parties share the remaining five seats. The new deputies will take office on May 1.
Such a majority in Parliament is an unprecedented situation since the 1992 peace accords which ended twelve years of civil war.
Mr. Bukele, a young 39-year-old president, thus achieves his objective of controlling the Parliament which he faced during the first two years of his five-year, non-renewable mandate. He even went so far as to burst into Parliament on February 9, 2020 with the support of police and soldiers armed with assault rifles.
By controlling the legislative power, the Head of State will also be able to appoint judges to the Supreme Court and the General Prosecutor’s Office, two institutions with which he has already had trouble.
Accused of authoritarianism by his detractors, he harshly criticized the traditional parties, discredited during their passage to power by corruption cases, and enjoys popularity still stainless by showing his desire to fight against insecurity and crime organized.