Nayib Bukele is the big favorite to win the presidential elections in El Salvador. Barring a last-minute surprise, something very unlikely, Bukele will become the first president in the recent history of the Central American country to be re-elected. And despite the fact that the Constitution prohibits it and only allows a single five-year term, the Supreme Court of Justice issued a questioned ruling in November 2023 that endorsed his candidacy.
(Also read: Nayib Bukele: what is the life of the most popular president in Latin America like?)
With the path now clear, The young president, 42 years old, only needed 90 days to organize his re-election campaign. The wind is in his favor, since nine out of ten Salvadorans approve of his management, according to the 2023 Latinobarómetro, a study that positioned him as the most popular president in Latin America for his war against gangs.
This acceptance is reflected in the polls, which give him a comfortable margin of victory today in the first round with 70.9 percent of the votes, according to the Francisco Gavidia University survey.
His opponents, meanwhile, have carried out a discreet campaign, compared to other elections. Second in the polls, with 2.9 percent of voting intention, is Manuel Flores, of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Next is Joel Sánchez (2.7), from the Arena party, on the right. There are three other candidates on the list, but between the three they do not add up to 3 percent.
(Of interest: Justice of Panama upholds the 10-year sentence against former President Martinelli).
With this panorama, everything indicates that Bukele will govern the Central American country until 2029a period in which he promises to continue fighting against gangs and keep violence figures in single digits.
“Much of its popularity is due to its security strategy and tangible results. Much of this has been achieved as a result of its control in the Legislative Assembly and the judicial apparatus (…). Bukele has achieved what many governments in the region have not been able to: have a sustained level of popularity and at the same time face insecurity,” Valeria Vásquez, senior analyst at Control Risks for Central America, explains to this newspaper.
El Salvador is going to the polls “in a context of serious human rights violations and a profound deterioration of the rule of law,” said the Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (Wola) in this regard.
President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.
Single party?
In addition to the election of the president and vice president, the 5.5 million Salvadorans summoned will also elect a new Parliament, where Bukele's party, Nuevas Ideas, aspires to achieve majorities again. lhe polls speak of the conquest of 57 seats out of a total of 60, practically a single-party scheme.
After his tenure as mayor in Nuevo Cuscatlán (2012-2015) and in San Salvador (2015-2018), Bukele had a clear path to becoming president and strengthening his popularity. In 2019, at just 37 years old, he became the youngest president in the history of that country with 53 percent of the votes in the first round.
With a style that makes him more like an executive director of a company in Silicon Valley than a traditional politician, Bukele appealed to the fatigue of Salvadorans afflicted by the gang violence that has plagued the country since the 1990s. The political scientist Salvadoran Claudia Suárez, from the Central American Network of Political Scientists, analyzes that the president managed to attract new voters after connecting with a younger audience by campaigning through social networks, which helped him move the masses.
However, between 2019 and 2020, Bukele governed without majorities in Congress, which somewhat limited many of his projects. For this reason, in February 2020, the president entered the Legislative Chamber escorted by the military to ask the deputies to approve a loan of 109 million dollars to finance his plan against gangs, something that had previously been denied to him.
Although there was no quorum for that vote and he only said a brief prayer, it was an act of breaking with the institutions. The episode earned him rejection from the UN, the United States, the European Union, the Organization of American States (OAS) and NGOs, which called for respect for the separation of powers. However, outside the legislative headquarters, some 5,000 Salvadorans accompanied him in his staging.
This support was reflected in the 2021 Legislative Assembly, when the Nuevas Ideas party achieved a qualified majority to approve regulations without opposition. Since then, Bukele got the deputies of his party to help him tilt the Legislative and Judicial powers in his favor. On May 1, 2021, for example, the Assembly dismissed all members of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and the attorney general, their last obstacles to governing without opposition and having a free way for their re-election.
According to Bukele, the gangs controlled 80 percent of the country's territory.
Insecurity and economy
Then, in 2022, came the bloodiest weekend in the country's history. Between March 25 and 27 of that year, the gangs murdered 87 people. In response, the Government declared a state of emergency that has so far been extended more than 20 times, allowing authorities to detain people without arrest warrants.
This has led to 75,000 people being detained, representing about 1 percent of the population. According to NGO calculations, 7,000 of these prisoners have been declared innocent. The measure has also been accompanied by the construction of megaprisons to subject the prison population to strict regimes.
The truth is that, in 2023, El Salvador closed with a rate of 2.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the National Policeadding eight consecutive years of reductions since 2015, when the rate was 103. And although the University Observatory of Human Rights of the Central American University of El Salvador criticizes last year's data because it does not include deaths of gang members or confrontations with the police, Salvadorans claim to feel safer.
It should also be said that homicide rates began to decline in El Salvador even before Bukele's arrival. According to Edwin Segura, a journalist from La Prensa Gráfica, from El Salvador, between 2015 and 2018 the homicide rate was reduced by half and then by a third between 2018 and 2021.
To this reduction would be added a pact that the government would have made under the table with the gangs. According to a CNN article, in 2021, the US Treasury Department sanctioned two Bukele government officials for having carried out opaque negotiations. The ruling party has repeatedly rejected these versions.
“The measure has produced results, generating more confidence in the population. However, there are families who have suffered the detention of a child and have not had the right to a hearing. As they say: 'the righteous have paid for the sinners,'” said political scientist Suárez.
Although security is the most notable achievement of Bukele's first five years, if he wins the second term he will have the economy ahead of him as a great debt.
This issue displaced crime as the main concern of Salvadorans. 32.8 percent of the population considers that the economic situation is the “main problem.”
In fact, El Salvador continues to be the one that is growing the least in Central America and whose monetary poverty went from 22.8 percent of households to 26.6 in 2019, with a growth of 3.8 percentage points.
The Mara Salvatrucha prisoners were shown to the press to demonstrate that the government has not made any deal with them.
Regional effect?
Now, analysts wonder what effect a new Bukele victory could have for Latin America, a region hit by criminal violence, and in whom they see a “model” to replicate. For Christophe Ventura, Research Director of the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS), a reelection will “reinforce” the model of “authoritarian populism” in a Latin America “that faces a multifactorial crisis,” he said for AFP.
The truth is that the “Bukele effect” has gained followers in Chile and Argentina, passing through Peru, Ecuador – which faces a fierce onslaught of drug trafficking –, Honduras or the once quiet Costa Rica.
“In the coming years we will undoubtedly continue to see how other governments in the region try to replicate the Bukele model. However, it is unlikely to be a success (at least not at all). The context and security conditions in El Salvador are different from those of the rest of the countries. In El Salvador, the presence of organized crime is comparatively minor in relation to what is experienced in places like Ecuador. Rather, the main problem lies in the presence of gangs, which creates a very different scenario,” analyst Vásquez points out.
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