President claims landslide victory
SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR >> Nayib Bukele, the millennial president who reshaped his country by cracking down on both gangs and civil liberties, has claimed a resounding victory in El Salvador's election that would extend his dominion over every lever of government for years.
Official results have not yet been announced, but polls had telegraphed Bukele's landslide win for weeks, showing that voters were almost certain to hand him another five-year term and extend his party's supermajority in the legislature.
Delivering a speech to thousands of supporters who gathered in the central square of San Salvador, the capital, Sunday night, the president claimed that he won more than 85% of the vote and that his New Ideas party had captured almost every seat in the legislature, brushing aside concerns about repressive practices and the deterioration of democratic norms under his watch.
“This will be the first time where one party rules a country in a completely democratic system,” Bukele told the crowd. “The entire opposition has been pulverized.”
Problems with the recording of the vote count stalled the transmission of preliminary results Sunday night, and by Monday morning polling stations had switched to recording the votes by hand, the electoral authority said. The website with the preliminary results showed that with 70% of the ballots processed, Bukele had 83% of the vote.
The count for the legislature was unclear as of Monday morning.
Legal scholars say Bukele violated the El Salvador Constitution by seeking a second consecutive term, but voters made it clear they supported him anyway.
Since imposing a state of emergency in the spring of 2022, the Bukele government has arrested tens of thousands of people with no due process, filled the streets with soldiers and suspended key civil liberties. But the gangs that once ruled over much of the country have been decimated — making the 42-year-old leader enormously popular.
“The majority of Salvadorans are in agreement that Bukele should stay,” said David Lobato, 38, outside a polling
station in San Salvador, the capital. “He's turned the country around. Things are different now.”
The five opposition candidates for president gained almost no traction in the polls. Among them were contenders from the rightwing Arena and leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front parties, which had dominated Salvadoran politics for 30 years.
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken congratulated Bukele in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “We look forward to continuing to prioritize good governance, inclusive economic prosperity, fair trial guarantees, and human rights in El Salvador,” he said.
Ricardo Zuniga, a former special envoy to Central America for the Biden administration, said Bukele's decision to seek a second term was “a demonstration of power.”
“They want to show that they can do this,” he said. “They want to show they have popular backing for doing it — and they want everyone to just live with it, regardless of the constitution.”
Critics said they worried that the vote Sunday would only embolden Bukele to deepen his attacks on the media, civic groups and anyone else he views as posing a threat to his control.
Bukele's vice-presidential running mate, Félix Ulloa, recently told The New York Times that they were “eliminating” a broken democratic system that had benefited corrupt politicians and left tens of thousands of dead. “To these people who say
democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes — we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new,” Ulloa said.
On Sunday, at a news conference, Bukele said, “We are not replacing democracy, because El Salvador has never had democracy,” adding, “this is the first time in history that El Salvador has democracy.”
The main selling point of Bukele's campaign was the state of emergency his government has imposed for nearly two years, since the gangs that had long dominated the streets went on a killing spree in March 2022.
Since then, the authorities have arrested roughly 75,000 people, including 7,000 who were eventually released and thousands more who are not gang members but remain jailed, human rights groups say. They have documented reports of prisoners being tortured and deprived of food.
But El Salvador's transformation has been undeniable. The three biggest gangs that made the country one of the most violent places on Earth appear to have lost any semblance of power.
“The main pillar on which he has built his popular backing is what the government has done on security,” said Omar Serrano, vice chancellor for social outreach at José Simeón Cañas Central American University. “The state of emergency is what people value most.”
Bukele, a descendant of a family of Palestinian migrants who arrived in Central America in the early
20th century, was one of 10 siblings and half siblings raised in Escalón, an uppermiddle-class neighborhood in San Salvador. He studied at an elite, bilingual high school.
After working as a publicist on political campaigns, Bukele moved into politics in 2011 and quickly rose to prominence. At the age of 30, he became mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a small town on the outskirts of San Salvador, representing the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the leftist party. Three years later, he became mayor of San Salvador, a post considered a steppingstone to the presidency.
In the lead-up to the 2019 presidential elections, Bukele created his own party, New Ideas, but ran as a candidate of a small right-wing party, GANA, to meet the legal requirements to compete. He sailed to victory on a vow to break with the corrupt politics of the past.
Once in office, though, he turned to tactics that many viewed as a return to the autocratic leadership the country had fought a 12-year civil war over, ending in 1992.
He marched soldiers into the legislative assembly to pressure lawmakers to pass government funding and later replaced an attorney general who was investigating corruption in his administration.
In 2021, after winning a supermajority in Congress, his party replaced top judges on the Supreme Court, who within months reinterpreted the constitution to allow Bukele to run again for the presidency.