According to analysts, the budget was not a serious plan, but a campaign tool. In addition, they criticize that it is worth of his position and state resources by proselytism.
President Nayib Bukele has not stopped campaigning since he began his tenure, and now continues to proselytize using the 2021 budget discussion as a campaign letter and trivializing its importance.
Roberto Rubio, executive director of the National Foundation for Development (Fon), argues that President Bukele has taken advantage of the fact that the Assembly has not had much prestige and that the majority parties have already ruled and he finds it “wonderful” to fight with the Assembly and accuse it of ruining its projects, even if it is counterbalancing its power and asking for explanations.
“The typical populist blames others. He never accepts his mistakes and wants everything approved of him, and never in history since the Peace Accords, a budget has been presented as the Executive wants, that’s why it exists just the Legislature, for not approving everything it wants, ”says Ros.
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With regard to the commercial published over the weekend on the budget, he reflects that he does not explicitly ask the population to vote, but maintains his strategy of “generating conflict as part of an electoral strategy through tweets , and while the country is in trouble, he (Bukele) is still in an electoral reality, everything is subject to the electoral because the goal of the populist is to concentrate power. “
Leonor Selva, political analyst and deputy candidate for our Time, notes that the country has never seen a president discuss important issues such as the nation’s budget and reforms to the pension system in a campaign sport and not as a serious public policy.
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“The announcement of the alleged masterpiece, which is more of a suicide as a country, the idea of spending the budget in four months, this is not a masterpiece because it is not hurting traditional parties, it is doing it is bad for the citizen who is going to have to pay this excess of funds that will be wasted in four months that are electoral months “, Selva points out. He believes the president intends to spend public money as part of an election campaign and not as an investment plan for the country and the population.
“It’s clearly an election letter, it’s a white letter to ministers telling them ‘spend all the money to make it look like we’re working’ when in fact for the country, which already has 90% debt, that’s suicide.” , indicates Selva.
FMLN MP Víctor Suazo explains that the Executive’s electoral intention was evident from the start of the presentation of the budget.
“The spot was made from the beginning and when we saw the budget and analyzed it, we saw that the purpose with which they presented it was not to make this budget an economic tool of reactivation, rather it was a tool of populism where expenses that had no support in terms of income were increased, ”says the legislator.
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He adds that the government made a fictitious projection of revenue to support expenses that did not have support over time, which meant that they could make electoral use of the budget by promising works, without having the necessary resources.
Suazo explains that the Executive filed an application for the issuance of bonds for $ 1,342,000 which they later said they did not need but these funds did not reduce their expenses, which he argues that from the beginning it was an electoral strategy the draft budget.
“Now they come and make a new spot, which is very long, more than six minutes, this is very expensive, and it shows that it is correct what the Legislature did when it cut the budget for advertising “, he mentions.
In this spot, the efemelenista parliamentarian criticizes that the Executive presents projects “that have nothing to do with what they presented (in the budget) and want to show the population that it is good to make cuts to projects of the municipalities already NGO” .
Misuse of state resources
Eduardo Escobar, executive director of Citizen Action, opines that President Bukele is making a hypothetical that they will win a majority in the Assembly and that he should not be using state resources to promote a political party or signal an election result that favor him.
“The spot is pointing to the next Assembly is calling on the people to support New Ideas and using state resources. This is the questionable thing, which is taking advantage of the charge of partisan politics, by using his figure as president to make this type of propaganda, which is prohibited by the Constitution, “Escobar points out.
Rubio, de Fon, points out that the president You are budgeting as a political weapon of discussion and with the statements that the budget will be spent in four months, in addition to being illegal is not viable because construction projects are done with payments staggered, in addition to the levels of execution of public works of this and other governments have hovered between 70% and 80% of the budget in a year.
“This government that has been quite inept, with these levels of under-execution that we have, nothing assures that this government will be so fit to run 90% or 100%, if it has not even been able to run the hospital El Salvador who was going to be in May and they haven’t finished it yet, which makes it unfeasible what he’s proposing, in operational terms, ”says Ros.