60.9 percent of the Salvadoran population considers that the president and aspiring immediate re-election by the official New Ideas (NI) party, Nayib Bukele, will win the presidential elections on February 4, according to a poll released Thursday.
The results of the survey of the Institute of Public Opinion (Iudop) of the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) also reveal that 27.6 percent of the people surveyed believe that NI will be victorious in these elections, thus increasing the percentage in favor of Bukele to 8.5 percent.
New Ideas would also win a majority of deputies for the Legislative Assembly, as 73.9 per cent of the population believes that it will be.
Fifty.4 per cent of respondents felt that Bukele would win the election because of the good work done in the last five years and 5.6 per cent that he will do so to continue the emergency measure, implemented since March 2022 to fight gangs.
47.6 per cent of the people consulted believe that the ruling party would win the presidential election because of the good work done and 5.4 per cent because it has the best candidate.
Ninety-s 11.5% of the population will go to vote on February 4 and only 6.8 per cent will not vote, according to the poll.
Moreover, the economy remains the main problem facing the country today, followed by unemployment and the high cost of living.
Omar Serrano, vice-rector of Social Projection of the UCA, pointed out during the presentation of the results that, according to the analysis, we are leading to elections characterized by the widespread disinformation of the population in the electoral process, this is evident.
He indicated that the elections are a basis for democratic legitimacy. However, they are not the only thing and are not enough to guarantee the quality of a democracy.
The Iudop survey was conducted between 3 and 14 January this year with a sample of 1,264 interviews nationwide, a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of about 2.76 per cent.
There are six candidates for the Salvadoran Presidency, among these Bukele who is the clear favorite to win these elections, despite the fact that immediate re-election is prohibited in this country by the Constitution.
Bukele’s path to re-election opened in 2021, when the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, which had been appointed by the Congress with an opposition majority without following the legal procedure, changed a criterion of interpretation of the Constitution.
This article has been translated from the original which first appeared in El Mundo