The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) declared “inadmissible” the request to reject the act of internal elections of Nuevas Ideas that proclaims the current president, Nayib Bukele, as a presidential candidate.
The request to not apply the ruling of the Constitutional Chamber that endorses the immediate presidential re-election in 2021, was also declared “inadmissible.”
The TSE justified its decision that the candidate registration period begins on September 7 and maintained that it is at that moment “when compliance with the constitutional and legal requirements must be verified.”
The lawsuit was filed by three citizens who asked to not apply the resolution of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), which enabled the re-election of Nayib Bukele.
Four of the five TSE magistrates affirmed that they cannot disapply the Chamber’s ruling that allows Bukele’s re-election, because the presentation and registration of his candidacy before the highest electoral court has not materialized.
“The requests of the lawyers Víctor Manuel Mejía Urbano, José Osvaldo Lemus Lozano and Rafael Antonio González Garciaguirre are declared inadmissible,” reads the document presented on Friday.
“They want this Court to exercise a kind of abstract control of constitutionality, an aspect for which this authority has no competence,” the four electoral magistrates say in their ruling, “The petition to reject the presidential candidacy of President Nayib Bukele is based in an “erroneous understanding of diffuse institutional control”, they assured.
The Court indicated in its resolution that both parties and coalitions, non-partisan candidates and citizens “who prove a legitimate interest”, because their political rights are affected, can, within “the period of 24 hours” from the publication of registration forms, “request the annulment of registration of candidacies.”
The Constitutional Chamber, appointed by the ruling party on May 1, 2021, issued a resolution in September of the same year in which it reinterpreted the concept of presidential alternation and ruled that the presidential re-election in the immediately preceding period refers to an interval of ten years.