AZ - El Salvador UPDATE
El Salvador election: Nayib Bukele claims presidency
11 minutes ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47113249
Nayib Bukele and his wife Gabriele de Bukele greet supporters in San Salvador, El Salvador, 3 February 2019Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
Nayib Bukele and his wife Gabriele de Bukele were cheered by supporters in San Salvador
Anti-corruption candidate Nayib Bukele has claimed victory in El Salvador's presidential election.
With most votes counted, the former mayor of San Salvador had nearly 53% of the vote with his closest rival, the conservative Carlos Calleja on 32%.
Mr Bukele, 37, needed more than 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off.
The businessman has vowed to tackle corruption and combat the criminal gangs responsible for one of the world's highest murder rates.
Politics in El Salvador has been dominated over the past three decades by two main parties - the incumbent left-wing FMLN and the conservative Arena.
"Today we won in the first round and we made history," Mr Bukele, who represents the Gana (National Alliance) party,
told cheering supporters, turning to include them in a selfie.
"We have turned the page on power."
Nayib Bukele takes a selfie with supportersImage copyrightEPA
Image caption
Nayib Bukele included his supporters in a selfie
His victory was acknowledged by Mr Calleja and by FMLN candidate Hugo Martinez.
"We recognise the results of these elections. We are going to call the president-elect to wish him luck in facing the challenges in this country," Mr Calleja said.
Mr Martinez was in third place with just over 14%.
Electoral officials said official results would be declared within two days.
Great National Alliance (GANA) supporters cheer after the presidential election in San Salvador, El Salvador, February 3, 2019Image copyrightREUTERS
Gana party supporters took to the streets of San Salvador in celebration
Earlier, the electoral court opened an investigation into whether Mr Bukele had broken the law by violating a news embargo.
He was accused of asking for votes during an interview broadcast live on Facebook earlier on Sunday.
Correspondents say Mr Bukele faces challenges in office including a sluggish economy and rampant poverty.
He has said he aims to increase investment in education and to set up an anti-corruption commission with the support of the UN.
To get his policies through he will need to form an alliance with right-wing parties, which dominate Congress.
END
MORE:
Bukele wins elections in El Salvador and breaks with bipartisanship
Calleja of the Republican Nationalist Alliance was second
https://www.nacion.com/el-mundo/bukele-gana-elecciones-de-el-salvador-y-rompe-con/4PORWZPDGBEVJF3CBS5BF7IFWM/story/
AFP Agency, AP Agency. 1 hour ago
The elected president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, with his wife Gabriela Rodríguez, after voting on Sunday.
The elected president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, with his wife Gabriela Rodríguez, after voting on Sunday.
San Salvador. The candidate of the Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA),
Nayib Bukele, will be the new president of El Salvador, after winning the elections held on Sunday.
Bukele won 53% of the vote, followed by Carlos Calleja - from the coalition of four conservative parties led by the Republican Nationalist Alliance (Arena) - with 32%.
On the other hand, former Foreign Minister Hugo Martínez -of the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) - won 14%
and Josué Alvarado -of the VAMOS party- barely 1%.
"At this moment we can announce with full certainty that we have won the presidency,"
Bukele told supporters at around 9:30 p.m. m. (local time) when the vote count was around 70% of the tables.
Then, the candidate summoned his supporters to the historical center of San Salvador, specifically to the Plaza Morazán to celebrate the triumph.
The new president will govern the country for the next five years, replacing former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén
who took office in 2014, promoted by the FMLN, the party that governs this Central American nation since 2009.
The triumph of GANA ends, in addition, with the bipartisanism that has governed the Central American country in the last 30 years,
in which only Arena and the FMLN had been in power.
Who is Bukele?
Known as "the swallow", by the emblem of his party,
Bukele managed to consolidate himself with an irreverent speech before the worn out traditional politics.
With short phrases that claim to the right "return the stolen", or that "money reaches when nobody steals,"
the president-elect of El Salvador has empathy with young people,
whom he maintains connected via social networks and his proposals presented by Facebook Live.
As mayor of San Salvador he identified with the "millennials", to the extent of projecting in the El Salvador del Mundo square
a film from the animated series Dragon Ball, participating in paintball competitions or participating in extreme mechanical games.
"This (electoral) battle is for every Salvadoran who has been ignored and abandoned by the governments of the day,
for every Salvadoran who had to migrate and leave everything behind,"
Nayib reflected last Sunday during the closing of his electoral campaign.
Bukele was born on July 24, 1981, son of the now deceased businessman Armando Bukele,
a doctor in industrial chemistry and representative of the Salvadoran community of Arab-Palestinian origin, and Olga Ortez.
Nayib has as brothers Yamil and Karim Bukele.
He studied law at the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in San Salvador, although his opponents questioned him
that he did not manage to graduate by dedicating himself from the age of 18 to work in a company of his father.
Married to Gabriela Rodríguez in 2014, Bukele revealed a week ago that they expect a baby.
The Bukele family sympathized with the principles of social justice that the leftist guerrillas of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) had been waging in the eighties to the extent of providing refuge to some of its leaders,
despite the risk of imprisonment or even death that he represented.
According to the book ¿Quién es Nayib Bukele ?, by the journalist Geovani Galeas, one afternoon in 1987
the candidate saw his guerrilla commander Schafik Handal, one of the five commanders of the FMLN leadership, enter secretly into his home.
This is how he inherited from his family the sympathy for the ex-guerrilla that,
after the end of the 12-year civil war, became a political party in 1992.
In 1999, from a publicity agency of his family, Bukele worked on a presidential campaign that the FMLN could not win,
with former commander Facundo Guardado as a candidate.
It was until 2011 that the FMLN was offered to compete for the mayoralty of Nuevo Cuscatlán,
a 10,000-inhabitant municipality next to the capital, where Bukele entered politics winning in the March 2012 election.
In November 2014, as part of World Cities Day, the UN invited him to talk about his transformative management in Nuevo Cuscatlán.
Given his popularity, the FMLN nominated him to recover the mayor's office of San Salvador that was in the hands of the right,
which he achieved for the period 2015-2018.
As mayor of San Salvador, his flagship projects were the lighting of the entire capital and the recovery and remodeling of part of the capital's historic center.
Although the FMLN bases supported him for a second term as mayor of the capital,
the party expelled him on October 10, 2017 for an altercation with a councilor.
During his campaign, Bukele lashed out against the 20 years of governments of the right-wing Arena
and the almost 10 years of the FMLN.
"The same as always (Arena and FMLN) thought that our people were never going to wake up,
they tried to tell us tirelessly that doing things right was impossible," he said at the end of the campaign.
END
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