In practice the country’s political parties and their candidates began campaigning well in advance of the official start. The supreme electoral tribunal (TSE) has received some 30 complaints of advanced campaigning, although it has not sanctioned any party or candidate. Neither the ruling left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) nor the main right-wing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) had an official central launch to their campaigns, possibly a tacit acknowledgement that they were effectively already underway, but locally several municipalities marked the campaign launch.
The campaign for the municipal elections, which will be held at the same time as the legislative elections, will begin on 31 January. Both campaigns will end on 25 February, four days before the elections.
Change to electoral rules
The way that the ‘voto cruzado’ will work in practice is that voters can vote for multiple legislative candidates from different parties. For instance, in San Salvador where 24 deputies are elected, a voter could hypothetically decide to vote for 18 Arena deputies and six deputies from the more moderate centre-right Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (Gana).
It is not clear how big an impact the change will have. It is unlikely that very many voters will vote for deputies from both Arena and the FMLN, for instance, and the majority will probably vote largely for their preferred party, although smaller parties like Gana should benefit from the change by picking up a smattering of votes they would not otherwise have received. The electorate might, however, choose not to vote for some of the party bigwigs who have served for many years and that the party hierarchies would have put at the top of closed lists in the past to ensure they got a seat.
Some politicians accused the constitutional court of issuing contradictory rulings. Shortly before the ‘voto cruzado’ ruling, elevating candidates above parties in the interests of greater electoral freedom for voters, the court banned floor-crossing in the legislative assembly by ruling that the creation of Unidos por El Salvador by Arena dissidents was unconstitutional.
“The ‘voto cruzado’ caused a tremendous controversy and at the root of this lies fear: that the power of the party is diminishing because people have more decision-making power,” the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chávez, said in an interview with the national television station Megavisión in early January. “In the big parties […] the so-called dinosaurs are trembling a bit because before they were immovable; not now,” he added. “People are no longer so interested in little [party political] campaign songs,” he said but want to know for whom they are voting.
Arena’s outgoing mayor of San Salvador, Norman Quijano, clearly feels those “little campaign songs” still have some currency. He plans to preside over an official ceremony to rename a street in the capital on 19 February after Major Roberto d’Aubuisson, who founded Arena in 1981. This is a mere nine days before the elections will take place. D’Aubuisson is a hugely polarising figure: revered by veteran Arenistas, he formed ultra-right death squads during El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992) and was named as the intellectual author of the murder of the archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, in 1980 in a report published by the United Nations (UN), although an amnesty law has ensured that this has never been investigated in El Salvador.
It is increasingly common for Arena’s new wave of politicians to express their admiration for Romero, and Deputy Edwin Zamora, who has been chosen to run for mayor in San Salvador instead of Quijano by Arena’s leadership committee (Coena), has shown he is keen to reform the party’s image, distancing the party from past associations and bringing it into the present. Quijano was chagrined to have been overlooked by Coena in favour of Zamora, who only joined Arena five years ago. In this light, some have interpreted Quijano’s street name-change as deliberate mischief-making, and a challenge to Zamora.
Too close to call
Two separate opinion polls in December showed that the difference between the FMLN and Arena was just 0.22 of a percentage point. One poll conducted by the national daily La Prensa Gráfica put the FMLN’s voter intention at 29.2% in the legislative contest and Arena at 28.9%. As regards the mayoral contests, the FMLN had a slightly larger lead of 30.4% to 28.3%, although it is worth noting that the FMLN won far fewer mayoral contests than Arena in the last elections in 2012. Then Arena took 116 of the 262 municipalities, while the FMLN won 85.
Another poll by the Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP) of the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) gave Arena a slight lead of 30.9% to 29.8% over the FMLN as regards the legislative contest, and the FMLN a 30.8%-29.1% lead over Arena in the municipal contests.
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