Election of the weekend I: El Salvador

In 2012, at the age of 30, Nayib Bukele, a grandson of Palestinian immigrants, president of a small marketing agency and the owner-manager of his family’s Yamaha dealership, won the mayoralty of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small town in the greater San Salvador area. Three years later, he was elected mayor of San Salvador. During these elections, he was a member of FMLN, the leftmost of El Salvador’s two primary political parties. In 20217, he was formally expelled from the party in 2017, due in large part to his sharp criticisms of then-president and FMLN leader Salvador Sanchez Ceren. By then, Bukele’s star was on the rise, and the decision to expel him may have contributed to FMLN’s losses in the 2018 legislative election.

In 2019, he set out to run for president, under the flag of the minor center-left party Democratic Change. El Salvador’s two main political parties were colluding to prevent him from legally forming his own, and courts managed to get Democratic Change disqualified. He ultimately ran under the banner of the minor center-right party Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA). He won easily, over 20 points ahead of his nearest opponent and with 53% of the vote, eliminating the need for a runoff election. His party Nuevas Ideas now Salvadoran politics following the 2021 legislative elections, holding roughly 2/3 of the seats in the national legislature and El Salvador’s seats in the Central American Parliament, and controlling roughly 60% of municipal governments.

Despite his left-wing origins, Bukele shares a great deal with, and should probably be considered as part of, the global rise of right-wing illiberal, de-democratizing populism. In 2020, (before the legislative election that put his party in power), he ordered a special legislative session and sent soldiers to the legislative assembly in an attempt to intimidate them into approving a loan (the legislature wanted greater transparency and conditions on how the loan would be spent). It ultimately didn’t work, and produced denunciations from the expected sources. As an editorial in El Faro, a widely acclaimed investigative journalism outlet in El Salvador, put it: “With the military takeover of the assembly, Nayib Bukele laid to rest the last doubts about his character: he is showboating, populist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian. With the cheapest tricks – vile, dangerous, and claiming he has God on his side – he turned over a dark page in the history of our young democracy.” (Not unrelatedly, El Faro moved its legal and administrative headquarters to Costa Rica last year.) But this stunt also demonstrated the scope and depth of support Bukele had in Salvadoran society, and the constitutional latitude his supporters granted him. His popularity was further demonstrated in the following year’s legislative election which, as noted earlier, his new party swept. His re-election run itself is constitutionally dubious, at best. The judiciary, which checked his power in the crisis of 2020, has been effectively purged of anyone who might get in his way. His signature issue, cracking down on crime, has been pursued with utter disregard for civil liberties, ushering in a new era of mass incarceration, arbitrary detention, mass trials of over 900 people at a time, and torture of prisoners. By some estimates nearly 2% of the population is currently incarcerated. Bukele also rather gleefully inserts himself American culture war politics, appearing in a friendly interview with Tucker Carlson, declaring he agreed with Trump on immigration (“He doesn’t want them to come, I don’t want them to go”). He made bitcoin a legal currency in El Salvador, creating digital wallets with $30 dollars worth of bitcoin for all citizens, many of which were promptly hacked. (The bitcoin thing was good for headlines and getting a bunch of positive buzz from bitcoin enthusiasts, but as a policy is has been wildly overblown; the government’s bitcoin holdings are trivial and it is not widely used; El Salvador receives a lower share of remittances via bitcoin than Mexico does.) He refers to himself as a “philosopher king” and the “the world’s coolest dictator.”

Let’s not beat around the bush. Tomorrow Bukele will win re-election easily, and his party will almost certainly expand their already large legislative majority. He is likely the most popular political leader in the world right now; at no point in his presidential term has his approval rating dropped below the low 80’s; the most recent polls have him above 90%. How does he outpace his right-populist authoritarian peers around the world in popularity? I would wager it has little to do with his culture war stunts and illiberalism, and more to do with the success of his anti-crime crackdown. During his presidency, El Salvador has gone from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to having a murder rate on par with Canada. Even if we don’t entirely trust the official stats (Bukele’s regime has tightened controls on access to official statistics), there’s no denying the decline has been quite substantial, and MS-13 and the 18th St gang appear to have been largely neutralized. And of course reducing crime that dramatically is likely to have knock-on effects, and it has: tourism is up, as is economic security. Economic growth has been solid throughout Bukele’s presidency, particularly in 2021.

I find it difficult to strike the right tone here. Obviously, for ordinary El Salvadorans, the sharp decline in crime is an important and positive good, and I can hardly blame them for rewarding the man who appears to be responsible for it. And the legacy parties were a horrible combination of corrupt and inept, and richly deserved to lose power. But none of that changes the fact that it’s far from clear El Salvadoran democracy can survive Bukele. Electoral changes prior to this election will shrink the legislative body from 84 seats to 60, and it’s entirely possible Bukele’s party will win all of them. It’s unclear there will even been a token opposition to his rule going forward.