‘World’s coolest dictator’ looks for win in El Salvador

Ignores law as he seeks reelection to presidency

MEJICANOS, El Salvador — Salvadorans voted in presidential and legislative elections Sunday, with many expressing willingness to forgo some elements of democracy if it means keeping gang violence at bay.

With soaring approval ratings and virtually no competition, Nayib Bukele was almost certainly headed for a second five-year term as president.

El Salvador’s constitution prohibits reelection. Nonetheless, about eight out of 10 voters support Bukele, according to a January poll from the University of Central America. That’s despite Bukele’s taking steps throughout his first term that lawyers and critics say chip away at the country’s system of checks and balances.

After his party was victorious in 2021 legislative elections, the newly elected congress purged the country’s constitutional court, replacing judges with loyalists. They later ruled that Bukele could run for a second term despite the constitutional ban on reelection.

Bukele’s administration has arrested more than 76,000 people since a gang crackdown began in March 2022. The massive arrests have been criticized for a lack of due process, but Salvadorans have retaken neighborhoods long controlled by gangs.

José Dionisio Serrano, 60, was proud to be the first person in line at 6 a.m. Sunday as voters started to wait outside a school in the formerly gang-controlled neighborhood of Zacamil in Mejicanos just north of San Salvador. The soccer teacher said he planned to vote for Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” and his party New Ideas.

“We need to keep changing, transforming,” Serrano said. “Honestly, we have lived through very hard periods in my life. As a citizen I have lived through periods of war, and this situation we had with the gangs. Now we have a big opportunity for our country. I want the generations that are coming up to live in a better world.”

Mejicanos was historically divided between two gangs most of Serrano’s life, and he had to flee for several years after gang members shot him and threatened his life. Asked about concerns that Bukele was seeking reelection despite a constitutional ban, he brushed it aside, saying, “What the people want is something else.”

El Salvador’s traditional parties from the left and right that created the vacuum Bukele first filled in 2019 remain in shambles. Alternating in power for some three decades, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) were thoroughly discredited by their own corruption and ineffectiveness. Their presidential candidates this year were polling in the low single digits.

“There’s a disconnect between the people and the political parties as a political structure,” said Joao Picardo, a researcher at Francisco Gavidia University. Salvadorans say they have “connected more with the figure of the president.”