El Salvador's Governing Party Hammered in Midterm Elections.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Salvador Sanchez Ceren's final year as president of El Salvador promises to be a particularly difficult one following nationwide legislative and municipal elections that saw his party, the leftist Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, FMLN), lose significant ground to the hard-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA).
The midterm elections held March 4 were the second to take place since Sanchez Ceren --a guerrilla commander during the country's dozen-year civil war (1980-1992)--squeezed into the presidency in 2014. And like the previous parliamentary and city elections, in March 2015, the results were deeply disappointing for a president and party desperate to shore up their tenuous hold on power.
Three years ago, the FMLN lost a handful of seats in the unicameral parliament, the Asamblea Legislativa (AL) but at least regained control of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital and largest city, for the first time in six years (NotiCen, March 12, 2015, and April 16, 2015). This time around, the governing party fared even worse, ceding another eight parliamentary seats while losing all but two of the country's 14 departmental capitals, including San Salvador, according to preliminary results.
"We recognize the clear message the Salvadoran people have given us at the polls," the Sanchez Ceren administration's spokesperson, Eugenio Chicas, told reporters on March 5, even before the preliminary results were in. "We have to read it as a hard message ... and correct the ways we've failed to serve the people."
Voter grievances
The results were widely interpreted as a "voto de castigo"--a punishment vote--for a party that, after nine years in power, has failed to steer the impoverished country toward any kind of substantial economic turnaround or make lasting improvements to its dismal security situation.
Since 2008, the last full year ARENA controlled the presidency before the FMLN took power under Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), El Salvador's GDP has grown, on average, less than 1.4% annually, according to the World Bank. In the meantime, the country's ghastly homicide numbers have continued to rank among the world's highest. In 2008, nearly 3,200 people were murdered, the Policia Nacional Civil (National Civil Police, PNC) reported. Last year the annual tally was just shy of 4,000, an improvement only with regards to the even more appalling 2015 and 2016...
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