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TEHRAN, Feb 03 -Salvadorans headed to the polls in the first round of a presidential election on Sunday, with an energetic former mayor campaigning as an anti-corruption outsider predicted to win the top job and end decades of a two-party system.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - Nayib Bukele, 37, has capitalized on the anti-establishment feeling sweeping elections across the region and further afield, as voters seek an alternative to traditional parties.
Since the end of its bloody civil war in 1992, El Salvador has been governed by just two parties: the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) ruling leftists, and its rival, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).
Though he describes himself as from the left and was expelled from the FMLN, Bukele has formed a coalition with parties including a right-wing one that together have just 11 seats in the legislature.
Pollster Mitofsky found in a January poll that Bukele had 57 percent of voter support, while a poll by Gallup showed him with 42 percent. Both polls show ARENA's Carlos Calleja in second place.
If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of Sunday's vote, two candidates will move into a runoff to be held in March.
El Salvador's next president will face US President Donald Trump's verbal attacks against Central American governments for not doing enough to prevent migration and will have to manage American backlash to recently established diplomatic relations with China.
The new government will also have to try to kick-start a sluggish economy, combat corruption, and tackle one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
"We're fed up with so much corruption," said Maria Amaya, a 42-year-old housewife, who said she previously voted for the FMLN. "The Front (FMLN) and ARENA had their time to do something and they didn't."
Fighting corruption
Bukele, who was San Salvador's mayor between 2015 to 2018, wants to create an international anti-corruption commission with the support of the United Nations, following similar committees in Guatemala and Honduras.
"We'll create a (commission)... so that the corrupt can't hide where they always hide, instead they'll have to give back what they stole," Bukele said in January.
When he was growing up, Bukele's relatively wealthy family was sympathetic to the FMLN, the former leftist guerrilla army that became a political party at the end of El Salvador's civil war in 1992.
But Bukele has turned away from Latin America's traditional left, branding Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega as well as conservative Honduran Juan Orlando Hernandez "dictators."
"A dictator is a dictator, on the 'right' or the 'left,'" Bukele, who has a large social media following, wrote last week on Twitter.
(Source: Reuters)
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