Nayib Bukele Poised to Win El Salvador Presidential Election by Historic Landslide

El Salvador will hold an unprecedented presidential election on Sunday as polls suggest President Nayib Bukele will win reelection by an overwhelming landslide despite the country’s Constitution explicitly forbidding presidents from seeking more than one term.

Sunday will see some 5.5 million Salvadorans head to the polls to choose who will lead their country for the next five years. The country entered a mandatory three-day silent period on Thursday in which no participating candidate or party may issue any kind of political statement or publish propaganda.

According to polls released by El Salvador’s Central American University in January, 81.9 percent of voters intend to vote for Bukele, placing the president vastly ahead of his closest rival, Manuel Flores of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Party (FMLN), who received 4.2 percent support. Joel Sánchez, of the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party, received 3.4 percent support in the poll.

Bukele, who now leads the ruling New Ideas (NI) party, was a former FMLN member until he was expelled in 2017 for “violating” the party’s principles. He successfully ran as an outsider in the 2019 presidential elections, in which he obtained 54 percent of the vote.

Bukele’s all-but-certain Sunday reelection is unprecedented in El Salvador’s modern democratic history and has generated international controversy, as the nation’s Constitution contains several articles that explicitly establish a five-year presidential term duration, prohibit serving multiple terms, and penalize “those who subscribe acts, proclamations or adhesions to promote or support the reelection or continuation of the President of the Republic, or use direct means to that end” with a complete loss of citizen rights.

Bukele will be able to run — and most certainly win — in Sunday’s election thanks to a controversial ruling issued by the Supreme Court of Justice in 2021.

The court, which had all of its top justices replaced by the pro-Bukele majority in Congress prior to the ruling, issued a new interpretation of Article 152 of the Salvadoran Constitution, which states, “The term of office of the President shall be five years and shall begin and end on the first day of June, and the person who has served as President shall not be able to continue in office for one more day.”

In its interpretation, the court argued that a sitting president would be able to run again so long as he or she resigns six months before the end of their five-year term. Bukele complied with the loophole, stepping down from the presidency on November 30, exactly six months before June 2024, the end of his current term.

The current official president of El Salvador is Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara, who assumed the office in December after serving as Bukele’s personal secretary. She will remain the figurehead president of the country until May 31, 2024.

The term limit controversy has had no visible impact on his popularity. He has enjoyed an approval rating hovering around 92 percent since November, making him the president with the highest approval rating in Latin America.

Bukele’s overwhelming popularity even extends to leftist-led countries such as Chile, where recent local polls showed that 78 percent of Chilean respondents hold a positive opinion of the Salvadoran president:

The soon-to-be-reelected president has attracted regional support through a fierce crackdown on the country’s once-rampant gang violence, targeting organized criminal syndicates such as Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13) and 18th Street.

The crackdown, which was implemented through an ongoing state of emergency decree that has restricted civil liberties, has led to a dramatic reduction in crime in El Salvador, including a drop of nearly 70 percent in the number of homicides, according to local security authorities.

In addition to building a 40,000-bed “mega prison” in February 2023, the Salvadoran government passed a series of reforms to the nation’s criminal code in July that allowed local courts to conduct mass trials for the thousands arrested as part of the crackdown.

RELATED — Law and Order: El Salvador Builds “Mega Prison” to Eradicate Gangs

Presidency of the Republic of El Salvador via Storyful

Salvadoran newspaper El Faro, which has been critical of Bukele’s administration, reported in 2023 that, as a result of the crackdown, gangs have virtually “disappeared” from El Salvador.

In September, El Faro described the upcoming election as merely an “administrative procedure” that Bukele needs to continue ruling El Salvador, given the virtual disappearance of opposition parties and the growing power and popularity of the ruling New Ideas Party.

In addition to the presidential election, El Salvador will hold legislative elections on Sunday and regional elections on March 3. Nuevas Ideas, which currently holds 56 out of the 84 seats in Congress, is expected to secure 57 seats, according to polls released by the Francisco Gavidia University.

This week, radical leftist U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) urged U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to take action against “threats to democracy” in El Salvador. Bukele responded by stating that he is “honored” to receive Omar’s attacks and would be “very worried” if he had her support instead.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.