President Nayib Bukele’s no-holds-barred clampdown on El Salvador’s notoriously violent Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs continues to pay political dividends, seeing him re-elected by a historically large margin on Monday.
Bukele declared victory over the weekend, when he posted on social media that “According to our [his party’s] figures, we have won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly.”
Provisional results show Bukele winning 83% support with 31% of the ballots counted, which would mean his New Ideas party would indeed secure almost all of the 60 seats in the country’s legislative body.
Later that day, Bukele went on to celebrate his anticipated victory on the balcony of the National Palace in the country’s capital of San Salvador.
“All together the opposition was pulverized,” Bukele, flanked by his wife, told a throng of supporters. “El Salvador went from being the most unsafe to the safest [country]. Now in these next five years, wait to see what we are going to do,” Bukele added.
Nuevas Ideas’ electoral success means Bukele will wield unprecedented power, allowing him to overhaul El Salvador’s constitution, which critics fear will result in doing away with term limits for presidents.
The hugely popular 42-year-old has captured many Salvadoreans’ loyalty, by being the driving force behind the restoration of law and order in his violence-ridden nation. That he used methods many have called unconstitutional has, so it turns out, not soured the voters towards the man.
Between 1979 and 1992, El Salvador—the smallest country in Central America—was torn by civil war, following which its largely gang-related murder rate, the highest globally, remained exceptionally high, with authorities appearing powerless (or unwilling) to address the problem. Bukele made it a core issue of his election campaign, and on that platform, came to power in 2019.
Within his first year in office, the murder rate dropped by almost 50%, and kept going down every single year.
Not content with that success, in 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency, as the country still had an estimated 120,000 gang members (out of a total population of 6,383,758, according to 2024 figures).
Currently, an estimated half of those alleged to have gang affiliations are incarcerated.
Human rights groups have been critical of the manner in which alleged gang members were detained: thousands, they claim, are said to have been unjustly detained, and denied a fair trial.
Since bringing the judiciary completely under his control since his first election in 2019, The Economist gave the president the moniker of being the world’s first “millennial dictator.”
Bukele cleverly pokes fun at such criticisms, having in the past changed his profile on X to say: “World’s coolest dictator.” Currently, it displays the more restrained “philosopher king.”
Misgivings aside, the saying ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ exists for a reason; some problems, if dire or existentially threatening enough, demand the label ‘state of emergency.’.
Under Bukele’s leadership the nation’s infamous murder rate has plummeted, extortion racketeering is down, and El Salvador is now deemed (relatively) safe enough for international tourism.
While its security might be bolstered, its economy remains the slowest growing in Central America. Extreme poverty is still rife, with over a quarter of Salvadorans living below the poverty line.
To help address its fiscal challenges, El Salvador is still in negotiations with the IMF for a $1.3 billion bailout, which have been frustrated by the country’s adoption of bitcoin as a currency, which the IMF said it was, “in general … not supportive” of.
These, then, will become Bukele’s two primary headaches. Making significant inroads with these could earn him the ‘philosopher king’ status he so aspires to achieve.
