Bukele is beginning a second five-year term in office where his authority will be paramount, the country's legislature a rubber stamp for the executive's agenda and the opposition remaining weak. El Salvadorans are overjoyed. Bukele has some of the highest approval ratings of any leader in the world, and won Sunday's presidential election by a margin of nearly 90 percent.
His astonishing popularity rests on one crucial issue: Since winning the presidency in 2019, Bukele has masterminded a massive crackdown on cartels and gangs that has spread for years across El Salvador and through networks throughout the region. His tough approach reduced the country's world-leading homicide rates and brought a degree of safety to Salvadoran neighborhoods. It has also inspired politicians, especially on the right, across Latin America to try to replicate Bukele's model.
However, critics point to its strict excesses. For two years, the country's legislature granted Bukele emergency powers to continue his fight against crime. “Bukele’s government used emergency powers to imprison more than 72,000 suspects — giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world,” my colleague Mary Beth Sheridan explained last year. “They face mass trials of up to 900 defendants. Human rights groups say many have been arbitrarily detained. The government has admitted some errors and released about 7,000 people.
Bukele, 42, mocked his critics, including officials in the Biden administration, which said the 2021 court ruling that paved the way for Bukele's second term “undermines democracy.” Bukele, bland and irreverent, then jokingly renamed his Twitter bio, now known as X, as “World’s Coolest Dictator.”
The vast majority of Salvadorans seemed unfazed, drawn instead to the populist promise inherent in Bukele's rhetoric to smash a failed status quo that has overseen stagnation, corruption and poverty. “This will be the first time in a country where there is only one party in a complete democracy,” Bukele exulted before cheering crowds on Sunday evening, adding that “the entire opposition together has been crushed.”
This is pretty much undeniable. “El Salvador’s traditional parties of left and right, which created the vacuum that Bukele first filled in 2019, remain in disarray,” the Associated Press noted. “After alternating in power for nearly three decades, the conservative Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front have completely lost their credibility due to their corruption and ineffectiveness.”
The Salvadoran president described the election as a referendum on his way of doing things in a society traumatized by decades of violence. “Why are there so many eyes on a small country in Latin America?” Bukele told his supporters. “They are afraid of the power of example.”
Bukele's biography on X no longer mentions anything about being a dictator. Now, he was known simply as the “Philosopher King.”
Bukele's success in El Salvador reflects a set of policies that extend beyond his small Central American country. In both developing and developed countries, democracies face historic tests. Opinion polls show rising public apathy on the part of voters, especially young people, and growing disillusionment with the ideals of liberal democracy itself.
“There is this growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that concepts like democracy, human rights, and due process have failed them,” said Tyler Mathias, Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch. He told the Associated Press.
That's why he became my Bukele A famous issue among the American right. “American liberal media.” I can not understand The US conservative declared that imposing strict power might make society better, freer and more liberal than expected, adding that Bukele “provides a successful, time-tested alternative to the liberal model of governance.”
But the road ahead for Bukele is far from smooth. His anti-gang measures are popular, but his country's economic situation remains precarious – inflation is a growing problem, and El Salvador still suffers from high rates of poverty and unemployment. Bukele's interesting and engaging attempt to make bitcoin legal currency in El Salvador does little to address the deeper problems.
“Showmanship is no substitute for governance, and a second term will inevitably increase pressure on Bukele to address the state of the economy,” wrote Christine Wade, a political scientist focusing on Latin America at Washington College. “With food insecurity on the rise and exports declining, Bukele will have to address the country’s socio-economic ills with policies that prove more effective than his stalled Bitcoin initiative.”
“If prices continue to rise and the government is unable to respond, Bukele’s five-year strong popularity may end in his second term,” Valeria Vasquez, senior analyst for Central America at consultancy Control Risks, told Americas Quarterly. “However, given the erosion of political opposition and checks and balances in the country, it will be difficult for any serious challenge to emerge.”
In fact, there is one overwhelming truth about El Salvador: “This is the Bukele model,” Juan Martinez Dubuisson, an anthropologist who has studied gangs in El Salvador, told Sheridan. “Concentrate all the power in one man.”
