The Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, 42, who describes himself as the “coolest dictator in the world” would have won the presidential election this Sunday with more than 85% of the votes.
In El Salvador, the young 42-year-old president, Nayib Bukele, should logically be reappointed. He would have been re-elected on Sunday with 85% of the votes.
The president’s party also reportedly won 58 of the 60 seats in the Assembly, a record in the country’s history.
Nayib Bukele has experienced a meteoric rise since 2019 by removing the main traditional parties from power.
He is best known for his radical policy against gangs in a country plagued by crime and drug trafficking.
The president has also announced his intention to maintain the “state of emergency”, in force since March 2022.
This exceptional regime, criticized by NGOs, sent some 75,000 people behind bars, of whom around 7,000 were unjustly incarcerated, then finally released.
But for the president, only results count. Murders attributable to maras, local gangs, have fallen from more than 800 in 2019 to 57 last year, according to the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
Neither right nor left, Nayib Bukele is rather liberal on the economy and conservative on the societal level. He describes himself as “the coolest dictator in the world.”
Initially, El Salvador’s constitution prohibited the re-election of a president but after Nayib Bukele’s party won the 2021 legislative elections, the country’s Constitutional Court was purged and eventually ruled that Bukele could run for a second term. Critics say he has eroded the country’s system of checks and balances.
The president said Sunday’s vote could be seen as a “referendum” on what his administration had done.
“We are not replacing democracy because El Salvador never had democracy,” did he declare. “This is the first time in history that El Salvador has democracy. And I’m not saying it, people are saying it.”
Asked about innocent victims of gang crackdowns, he said El Salvador currently had one of the highest incarceration rates in the world because it was transitioning from being the murder capital of the world to one of the safest countries. He dismissed foreign criticism as promoting failed “recipes” and ignoring the local solution his administration proposed.
