MEJICANOS, El Salvador (AP) — Salvadorans voted in presidential and legislative elections Sunday, with many expressing willingness to forego some elements of democracy if it means keeping gang violence at bay.
With soaring approval ratings and virtually no competition, Nayib Bukele was almost certainly headed for a second 5-year term as president. After voting, he jousted with reporters, asserting that the election’s results would serve as a referendum on his administration.
El Salvador’s constitution prohibits reelection. Nonetheless, about eight out of 10 voters support Bukele, according to a January poll from the University of Central America. That’s despite Bukele taking steps throughout his first term that lawyers and critics say chip away at the country’s system of checks and balances.
After his party was victorious in 2021 legislative elections, the newly elected congress purged the country’s constitutional court, replacing judges with loyalists. They later ruled that Bukele could run for a second term despite the constitutional ban on reelection.
Bukele’s administration has arrested more than 76,000 people since a gang crackdown began in March 2022. The massive arrests have been criticized for a lack of due process, but Salvadorans have retaken their neighborhoods long controlled by gangs.
José Dionisio Serrano, 60, was proud to be the first person in line at 6 a.m. Sunday as voters started to wait outside a school in the formerly gang-controlled neighborhood of Zacamil in Mejicanos just north of San Salvador. The soccer teacher said he planned to vote for Bukele and his party New Ideas.
“We need to keep changing, transforming,” Serrano said. “Honestly, we have lived through very hard periods in my life. As a citizen I have lived through periods of war, and this situation we had with the gangs. Now we have a big opportunity for our country. I want the generations that are coming up to live in a better world.”
Mejicanos was historically divided between two gangs most of Serrano’s life, and he had to flee for several years after gang members shot him and threatened his life. Asked about concerns that Bukele was seeking reelection despite a constitutional ban, he brushed it aside, saying, “What the people want is something else.”
El Salvador’s traditional parties from the left and right that created the vacuum that Bukele first filled in 2019 remain in shambles. Alternating in power for some three decades, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) were thoroughly discredited by their own corruption and ineffectiveness. Their presidential candidates this year were polling in the low single digits.
“There’s a disconnect between the people and the political parties as a political structure,” said Joao Picardo, a researcher at Francisco Gavidia University. Salvadorans say they have “connected more with the figure of the president.”
Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” has gained fame for his brutal crackdown on gangs, in which more than 1% of the country’s population has been arrested.
On Sunday afternoon, Bukele waded through a crowd of supporters to vote wearing a blue golf shirt and white baseball cap.
Smiling, Bukele and his wife 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 has a habit of trolling his critics.
Shortly after casting his vote, Bukele said at a news conference that it was important to elect a Legislative Assembly that will continue approving the state of emergency that has given him extraordinary powers to combat the gangs.
Bukele said the vote could be seen as a referendum on what his administration had done.
“We are not substituting democracy because El Salvador never had democracy,” he said. “This is the first time in history that El Salvador has democracy. And I’m not saying it, the people say it.”
Asked about innocents swept up in the gang crackdown, he said El Salvador had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates now because it is moving from being the world’s murder capital to being one of its safest countries. He dismissed foreign criticism as promoting failed “recipes” and ignoring his administration’s homegrown solution.
While his administration is accused of committing widespread human rights abuses, violence has also plummeted in a country known just a few years ago as one of the most dangerous in the world.
Because of that, voters like 55-year-old businesswoman Marleny Mena are willing to overlook concerns that Bukele has taken undemocratic…
Read More: El Salvador election: Salvadorans head to vote as Bukele eyes second term