FMLN Criticizes Bukele's Electoral Reforms in El Salvador

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) denounced that the recently approved electoral reforms are designed to keep the National Assembly under the control of Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele's New Ideas party.

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In the early hours of Wednesday, the pro-government Assembly approved the reduction in the number of legislators from 84 to 60 as of the next legislature, which will be elected in 2024.

The new norm "eliminates legislators by residue, leaving only legislators assigned by number of votes," Bukele said a few hours later when signing the decree that would allow the reform to be published in the official registry.

"With this reform, political participation is no longer plural. The Legislative Assembly would be made up of only three or four parties, which eliminates the possibility of minority representation,” the head of the FMLN legislative caucus Jaime Guevara said.

“By reducing to only two lawmaker per department, the representation of the social sectors is also reduced and the official party is favored. This reform is practically a dirty trick whereby the government changes the rules of the game when they don't benefit it,” he added.

For decades, El Salvador has defined the number of legislators through the Hare formula, which divided the votes cast in a constituency among the seats contested there.

This quotient was then used to award each party as many seats as times it reached that quotient with its votes. If there were seats to be assigned after a first distribution of seats, the electoral authorities assigned seats considering the parties that had the largest residuals.

In the 2024 elections, El Salvador will use the D'Hondt system, which distributes the number of seats in proportion to the number of votes obtained by each party. This means that the parties that do not reach a minimum percentage of ballots are discarded for the distribution of seats.