Today El Salvador will choose president

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At this moment the presidential elections are being held in El Salvador

Today will be the election day in the Central American country. The polling stations, which comprise more than 1,500 seats around the country, were opened this morning at 7 a.m. and closed at 5 p.m. According to the First Electoral Monitoring Report 2019, cited by CNN, around 1.3 million votes are needed to win the presidential elections in El Salvador. 5 million voters were called, so this figure seems, according to what happened in the last elections in El Salvador, what a candidate needs to guarantee a victory in the second round.

Leer en español: Hoy El Salvador elegirá presidente

The candidates

Today El Salvador will be choosing between four candidates: Nayib Bukele, for the GANA party; Carlos Calleja, for the ARENA party; Hugo Martínez, for the FMLN party and Josué Alvarado for the VAMOS party. The favorite according to the polls is Bukele, former mayor of San Salvador. It is the candidate of the Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA) and winning would be the first time in at least 30 years that the president of El Salvador was a party other than the two traditional: Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA), rightist, who governed El Salvador for 20 consecutive years since 1989; and Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberacion Nacion (FMLN), of the left, which has won the presidency the last two elections.

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This preference for the candidate who defines himself as outside the bipartisanship puts in evidence a discontent for the two traditional parties. This is also seen in the polls, which place ARENA and FMLN in the second and third place without as much force as the favorite candidate, with about 40% of the votes as they say.

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Election day

So far it has been normal and calm. The polling stations are open from 7 in the morning and will close at 5 in the afternoon and then give the results some time later. According to CNN, there are 1,595 electoral centers around the Salvadoran territory so that voters can exercise their right to vote. These positions will be protected by 10,537 agents of the National Civil Police who will be in a fixed position in security tasks. On the other hand, there are also another 13,000 police officers scattered throughout the territory to prevent insecurity of some kind. Also, members of the Red Cross and Cruz Verde are present at the polling stations to attend any emergency that may arise.

The current president of El Salvador, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, of the leftist party, invited voters to vote with enthusiasm and patriotic sentiment. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), said, meanwhile, that tonight we could know the results, depending on the efficiency of the system.

LatinAmerican Post | Juliana Rodríguez Pabón

Translated from "Hoy El Salvador elegirá presidente"