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| - Salvadorans went to the polls Sunday to elect new lawmakers and mayors in a vote that could deliver on President Nayib Bukele's plans for an absolute majority in parliament. Bukele, accused of authoritarianism by his detractors, hopes to have his hands untied after a frustrating two years of blockages by an opposition-controlled parliament. Opinion polls projected victory for the New Ideas party founded by Bukele in 2018, and the Grand Alliance for National Unity, through which he came to power. Long queues of voters wearing face masks amid the coronavirus pandemic formed long before voting started at 7:00 am (1300 GMT), though many stations opened hours late. The delay prompted Bukele to level accusations of wrongdoing against the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on Twitter. "We told them 1,000 times that, whether through corruption or incompetence, they would do everything wrong," he said. But an election observer told AFP he had seen no evidence of voter fraud. And the Organization of American States appealed to leaders and political parties not to spread false information on social media. Some 40,000 police, soldiers and international observers were deployed to oversee the balloting, which comes after the worst political violence in years claimed two lives last month. "We hope to have a peaceful election day, a truly civic celebration crowned by massive participation," TSE president Dora Martinez told national TV. Some 5.4 million voters are eligible to elect 84 members of the Legislative Assembly from among 10 political parties. A recent poll projected Bukele's allies would take a comfortable majority in parliament, which would give the president more power over crucial decisions and lawmaking. Elected in 2019 for a five-year term, Bukele, who is 39 and is of Palestinian and Greek descent, has had trouble getting some programs approved in a parliament dominated by two opposition parties -- the rightwing Arena and leftist FMLN. In February 2020, in a bid to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to finance an anti-crime plan, the president ordered heavily armed police and soldiers to storm parliament. When lawmakers recently called for a congressional committee to declare Bukele "mentally incapable" of governing, he denounced it as an "attempted parliamentary coup." Since a peace deal in 1992 brought an end to more than a decade of civil war, no party has won an absolute majority in parliament. With a majority, Bukele would be able to appoint judges to the Supreme Court and the public prosecutor's office -- institutions with which he has clashed. Polls predict victory for Bukele backers in the vote for 262 mayors and for El Salvador's 20 representatives to the six-nation Central American Parliament. The outgoing president of El Salvador's parliament, Mario Ponce, warned against creeping "authoritarianism" ahead of the election, even as Bukele broke electoral rules in campaigning for his party beyond the cutoff date. The Catholic Church's Episcopal Conference of El Salvador denounced pre-election violence, which saw two FMLN activists shot dead while campaigning in late January, days after Bukele criticized the 1992 peace accords. cmm/mas/mav/mls/gma/mlr/bbk
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