Today has seen El Salvador’s 2nd round run-off election between the governing FMLN party and opposition ARENA. Everyone expected FMLN to win fairly easilt, but that’s not the case, as right now with 1.2% 0.96% of the votes left to be tallied, FMLN has 50.08% 50.07% and ARENA 49.92% 49.93%. That’s less than 4,500 4,400 votes to decide who gets to be President and close = problems.
(note: those strikeouts are the updated figures and give you an idea of how darned close this one is)
That’s because the right wing ARENA candidate Norman Quijano has just denounced voter fraud, declared himself the winner and has called on the armed forces to intervene. This is not good.
Follow the vote count here at the official government page.
Mike at Central American Politics is strong on El Salvador and can be found here.
Tim’s El Salvador Blog is a great info site for English language news on the country. That’s here.