El Salvador court drops ban on presidential reelection

SAN SALVADOR – El Salvador's apical tribunal and its predetermination authorization person tossed speech what seemed to beryllium a law prohibition connected consecutive statesmanlike reelection, mounting the signifier for President Nayib Bukele to perchance question a 2nd word successful 2024.

The Supreme Court's Constitutional Chamber connected Friday told the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to licence a 2nd term, and the electoral authorization announced connected Saturday it would judge what it called a ruling that cannot beryllium appealed.

The rulings — by a tribunal precocious overhauled by Bukele's enactment — alarmed absorption parties and national activistic groups who person agelong accused the fashionable person of authoritarian tendencies and who said the ruling was intelligibly unconstitutional.

Bukele has not truthful acold announced plans to question reelection, but critics presume helium will.

“The predetermination of 2024 volition beryllium a large farce,” said lawyer Eduardo Escobar of the nongovernmental radical Citizen Action.

Ad

Until now, courts person interpreted El Salvador's constitution to forbid presidents from seeking reelection for 10 years — equivalent to 2 five-year presumption of the National Assembly — aft their archetypal term.

The constitution bars the candidacy of those who person held the presidency for much than six months “during the play instantly earlier oregon during the past six months earlier the opening of the statesmanlike term.”

The populist president elected successful 2019 has maintained precocious popularity with his vows to stamp retired corruption that was rampant among the country's accepted parties. His New Ideas enactment won a legislature bulk this twelvemonth and instantly aft taking its seats successful the National Assembly successful May, it replaced the 5 members of the Constitutional Chamber and the autarkic lawyer wide who had balked astatine respective of Bukele's earlier actions.

Attorney Salvador Salvador Enrique Anaya, whose lawsuit challenging efforts to beforehand reelection led to the tribunal action, argued that the determination “has nary ineligible value: It is not signed by the justices.”

Ad

“The authorities ceased to beryllium astatine the work of the radical and passed to beryllium astatine the work of 1 person,” tweeted Anabel Belloso, a legislature subordinate for the absorption Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The blimpish Nationalist Republican Alliance said the effort to support and ore powerfulness “is the precursor to a dictatorship. Power tends to corrupt. Absolute powerfulness corrupts absolutely.”

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This worldly whitethorn not beryllium published, broadcast, rewritten oregon redistributed without permission.