El Salvador Presidential Elections: Electoral Council Declares Leftist Salvador Sánchez Cerén Winner

El Salvador’s national electoral council declared current vice-president Salvador Sánchez Cerén the official president-elect on Monday after the current vice president and candidate with the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) won 50.11 percent of the vote. The council also rejected calls from the conservative candidate, Norman Quijano of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), to annul the results. Quijano, who according to the council’s final tally won 49.89 percent of the votes, had claimed last week that his team had evidence of electoral fraud being carried out by the governing FMLN.

Eugenio Chicas, president of the electoral council, said there was not sufficient evidence of fraud to withhold a final decision on the elections. CNN reports that Quijano’s team refused comment on the council’s announcement. On Friday, Quijano filed a constitutional appeal with the El Salvadoran supreme court in which he sought to have the council open the urns at the polling stations to carry out a vote-by-vote recount. He told Mexico’s El Universal last week that his team estimated that there had been “at least 20,000 double votes” in an election decided by a matter of about 6,000 votes.

Excelsior notes that the 69-year-old Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who will take power from current FMLN president Mauricio Funes on June 1 and govern for a five-year term, becomes the first ex-guerilla commander from the 1980-92 civil war -- which pitted the US-backed ARENA party government against Cuba and Soviet-bloc-supported FMLN rebels -- to ascend to the El Salvadoran presidency. A former teacher, he also later served as education minister after the UN brokered a truce that granted the FMLN legitimacy as a political party.