General elections were held in El Salvador on 20 March 1994, with a second round of the presidential elections taking place on 24 April. The president, vice president, 84 members of the National Assembly, and 262 mayors, were all up for election this cycle.

Armando Calderón Sol of the Nationalist Republican Alliance won the presidential elections, whilst his party also won the legislative elections. Voter turnout was 52.27% in the first round of the presidential elections and 45.51% in the second, whilst it was 53.08% for the legislative election.

Background This marked the first election in El Salvador since the signing of a peace agreement with the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, a former guerrilla group that morphed into a political party after the agreement was signed. A new electoral register was created after the signing of the peace agreement, in which roughly 780,000 individuals signed up to vote, which required the submission of a birth certificate or a duplicate for eligibility purposes. Of those individuals, around 74,000 of them did not receive voter registration cards. UN election observers reported that there were multiple cases of authorities withholding cameras to take pictures for registration cards in areas that generally supported the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. They also noted instances of mayors charging fees to duplicate lost birth certificates.

Alfredo Cristiani, who had served as president under the Nationalist Republican Alliance party, was ineligible for re-election, so Calderón Sol, the erstwhile mayor of San Salvador, became the nominee for the party. During this election, Calderón Sol was complimentary of former party leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, who founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance on anti-communist principles, while also seeking it expand its appeal by rebranding as a more mainstream conservative party. Explaining his approach, Calderón Sol said that "we are faithful to our past in the defense of free enterprise, a market economy, private property and individual liberties. But we use a different rhetoric, softer, more profound, easier for other groups to understand."

The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) conducted oversight on both the 20 March 1994 general election and later the 24 April 1994 presidential run-off election, which was triggered after no candidate exceeded the 50% threshold. The IFES wrote in their report that the voting process was completed in an "orderly, peaceful and transparent fashion which permitted the popular will of the Salvadoran people to be expressed", while also recognizing deficiencies in the "logistical organization of the elections along with problems with the electoral registry." They believed that there was an insufficient number of voting centers, resulting in difficulties in voters finding their names on the registry. The IFES also found shortcomings in voting center accessibility, which they attributed to inadequate public transportation and large distances between certain citizens and their polling places. 16,000 voting center officials received training for the election, of which 5,000 of them worked during election day.

Results President

Legislative Assembly

Municipalities

PARLACEN

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