The president and candidate for re-election, Nayib Bukele, achieved this Monday a crushing victory in El Salvador. Bukele is known for being a leader with a heavy hand (or also ‘cool dictator’) and accustomed to controversy. In fact, the last one occurred at a rally in front of the National Palace hours after proclaiming himself the winner of the elections when addressing to the Spanish press and tell him: “We are not going to be your lackeys”.

He is the Latin American president active that enjoys greater popularity thanks largely to its controversial anti-gang policy. This fight had to be replicated in Ecuador, where gang violence has caused chaos in the country. Bukele has won the elections using a legal trick, without a new government plan and without hitting the streets to campaign.

True to his style of breaking with tradition, Bukele aims to do one more: the tradition of single mandates since the country became a democracy and that was supported by the constitutional prohibition of immediate re-election. “No, there is no re-election (in El Salvador) and I would be out of the Presidency at 42 years old,” Nayib Bukele said in March 2021 in an interview that he gave to two Mexican YouTubers.

In 2013, when he was mayor of the town of Nuevo Cuscatlán and was shown as an alternative to renew the former guerrilla of the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN, left), stated that “the Constitution does not allow the same person be president twice in a row”. However, in September 2022 before Congress, with a large pro-government majority, he announced his intention to seek immediate re-election.

To trace the last antecedent of this in El Salvador it is necessary to go back to the decade of the 1930s, when The dictator and military man Maximiliano Hernández Martínez did it and established the so-called ‘Martinato’, which lasted until 1944. Nayib Bukele is the first president of the Salvadoran democratic era to seek immediate re-election. This decision, the president said in September 2022, is so that he can “continue this path that he has started, the path that for the first time in history has proven to be the correct one.”

The image of a young and carefree politician

Bukele, with Arab roots and son of businessman Armando Bukele and Olga Marina Ortez, made the big leap in Salvadoran politics after his expulsion from the FMLN, now a minority opposition party, in 2017. His experience as a ppublicist and his image as a young andcasual They allowed him to capitalize on the discontent of Salvadorans against the political class.

The country had been governed for three decades by the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena, right) (1989-2009) and the FMLN (2009-2019) and they gave a face to the corruption and the inability to stop gang violence, which in 2015 had made the country the deadliest in the world. Bukele swept the first round in 2019 and broke with the call “bipartisanship” of the FMLN and Arena, which was repeated in Congress in 2021, when its image earned the Nuevas Ideas (NI) party an absolute majority.

It is with the assumption of this new legislature that the route to re-election begins to be configured, dismissing on the first day, without following the legal process, the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and appointing others, among advisors of the Government and lawyers of high officials, to whom that the United States called “loyal” to the Executive. In September 2021 in a ruling, which occurred in a process that, according to experts, does not have general effects such as the resolutions of unconstitutionalityopened the door to re-election.

Said order changed the interpretation that previous chambers had made that the Constitution prohibits immediate reelection, and established that the prohibition was for presidents who had served two terms (10 years) in power.

The war against gangs, their only proposal

At the end of March 2022, Congress decreed an emergency regime to suspend constitutional guarantees at the request of the Government of Nayib Bukele and thus start the so-called “war against gangs” after a spate of homicides. The gangs had put in check the Territorial Control Plan with which Bukele had managed to continue and accentuate the decrease in homicides that had occurred since 2016.

According to surveys published within the framework of the electoral campaign, This regime is the main asset for popularity of Nayib Bukele, mainly due to the reduction of the presence of gangs in popular communities. Something that has benefited him in these elections.

Despite the fact that Congress granted him license to campaign since December, and as a last requirement to compete in the February 4 elections, Bukele has stayed away from the streets. The candidate has had no public presentations, His favorite channel to publish is still X, from where he launched a video asking the population to vote for his party to maintain the absolute majority and continue with security measures. Nothing else.

He has not referred to other problems, such as state debt, the cost of living, the use of pension funds for government spending and the allegations of his Government’s negotiations with the gangs, and he has not presented a government plan either. In an X space on January 4, Nayib Bukele stated that would not seek to perpetuate in the power.