Edited by Deepali Verma
Salvadorans crowded the capital’s central square on the evening of February 4 to celebrate the expected reelection of Nayib Bukele as president even before any official results were announced.
With high reported approval ratings and virtually no competition, it is almost certain that Nayib Bukele will be headed for a second 5-year term as president. After two hours that the polling places closed, and without any official returns announcement, Bukele took to X and wrote that “according to our numbers” he had won.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal however started sharing partial, preliminary results around 9 p.m. Having tallied the votes from 31% of polling places, Bukele carried nearly 11 times the number of votes as his nearest competitor in the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.
During the news conference, the Electoral officials informed that the voting systems had worked as expected and without any hassle.
Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” has gained both traction and popularity for his brutal crackdown on gangs, in which more than 1% of the country’s population has been arrested.
As per El Salvador’s constitution, reelection is prohibited. However, after his party’s victory in the 2021 legislative elections, the newly elected congress purged the country’s constitutional court by replacing judges with loyalists. This later resulted in a ruling that Bukele could run for a second term. Critics are of the view that he has chipped away at the country’s system of checks and balances.
The night of February 4 saw Bukele’s face plastered on much of downtown San Salvador’s main square, on flags, shirts as well as life-size billboard cutouts.
Bukele’s administration has successfully arrested more than 76,000 people upon a gang crackdown that started in March 2022. The massive arrests have received due criticism for the lack of due procedure, but Salvadorans have made a return to their neighbourhoods after being long controlled by the gangs.
The traditional parties of both left and right from El Salvador created the vacuum that Bukele first filled in 2019 remaining in shambles. Alternatively assuming power for some three decades, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) were disregarded because of their corruption and ineffectiveness. Their presidential candidates of this year stood in the low single digits.
Bukele, on the afternoon of February 4, moved through a crowd of supporters to vote wearing a blue golf shirt and white baseball cap.
Bukele and his wife, all smiles, dropped their ballots into the box as R.E.M. ‘s 1987 hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” blared over speakers. Bukele carries a habit of trolling his critics.
Bukele, once having casted his vote, said at a news conference that it was important to elect a Legislative Assembly which will continue approving the state of emergency that granted him extraordinary powers to combat the gangs.
While his administration faces the accusation of engaging in widespread human rights abuses, violence has also recorded a fall in a country known just a few years ago as one of the most dangerous in the world.
In the lead-up to the voting, Bukele made no appearances for public campaigns. Rather he plastered his social media and television screens across the country displaying a simple message recorded from his couch: If he and his New Ideas party don’t emerge victorious in the elections this year, the “war with the gangs will continue to be put at risk.”
The 42-year-old Bukele and his party are looked at as a case study globally for a wider rise in authoritarianism.
“There is growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that concepts like democracy and human rights and due process have failed them,” Tyler Mattiace said, Americas researcher for Human Rights Watch.
