In El Salvador’s presidential contest on Sunday, there is no real contest: Nayib Bukele, the millennial president who reshaped the country with a crackdown on criminal gangs and civil liberties, is expected to win reelection by a landslide .
Legal experts say Bukele, 42, is violating a constitutional ban by seeking a second consecutive term, but most Salvadorans don’t seem to care.
Polls show voters overwhelmingly support Bukele’s candidacy and are likely to consolidate his party’s supermajority in Sunday’s legislature, extending the leader’s unhindered control of every lever of government for years.
“They want to show that they can do it, they want to show that they have the popular support to do it — and they want everyone to live with it, regardless of the Constitution,” said Ricardo Zuniga, who served as a representative of the US State Department. special envoy to Central America under President Biden. “It’s a show of power.”
Nearly 80 percent of Salvadorans said so supported Bukele’s candidacy in a recent poll. The same poll shows that his New Ideas party could win as many as 57 of the 60 seats in the legislature, after making changes to the composition of the legislative assembly that analysts say benefited the ruling party.
Bukele’s main selling point was the nearly two-year state of emergency imposed by his government after gangs that had long dominated the streets began a killing spree in March 2022.
Since then, authorities have arrested around 75,000 people, without due process, and suspended fundamental constitutional rights indefinitely.
But the effect was undeniable. The three gangs that made the country one of the most violent places on earth have lost any semblance of power.
“The main pillar on which he has built his popular support is what the government has done on security,” said Omar Serrano, vice-rector for social engagement at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University. “The state of emergency is what people appreciate most.”
Mr. Bukele, a descendant of a family of Palestinian migrants who arrived in Central America in the early 20th century, was one of eight siblings raised in Escalón, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in San Salvador, the capital. I studied at an elite bilingual high school.
After working as a publicist on political campaigns, Bukele moved into politics in 2011 and quickly rose to fame. At age 30, he became mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a town on the outskirts of San Salvador, representing the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party, or FMLN.
Three years later he became mayor of San Salvador, a position considered a stepping stone to the presidency. Ahead of the 2019 presidential election, he created his own New Ideas party but ran as a candidate for a small right-wing party, GANA, to meet the legal requirements to compete. He sailed to victory with a vow to break with the corrupt politics of the past.
Once in office, however, he turned to tactics that many saw as a return to the autocratic leadership over which the country had fought a 12-year civil war.
He marched soldiers into the legislature to pressure legislatures to approve government funding and later replaced an attorney general who was investigating corruption in his administration.
In 2021, after winning an absolute majority in Congress, his party replaced senior Supreme Court justices, who within months reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Bukele to compete for the presidency again.
Yet his appeal went almost unheard at home and among a sizable contingent of fans across the hemisphere. Politicians from Colombia to Ecuador have vowed to emulate him.
Erlinda Vela Gutiérrez, who runs a stall selling tchotchkes at a San Salvador market, said she had been inundated with tourists asking for accessories featuring the face of the man she called “my beloved president.” She has magnets, mugs, key rings and figurines.
Ms. Vela Gutiérrez, who lives in Las Margaritas, a neighborhood outside San Salvador that was once a bastion of the ruthless MS-13 gang, said whether Mr. Bukele was breaking democratic rules was not a concern.
“If he runs for president 10 times, I will take him 10 times,” he said. He said he has already sent his family in Maryland a batch of “hats, shirts, jackets, just from Bukele.”
This election will be the first time that Salvadorans living abroad will vote en masse, after the government allowed early voting on an app, a move that analysts say was designed to capitalize on Bukele’s popularity among those who emigrated to the United States.
More than 140,000 Salvadorans abroad have already voted, compared to fewer than 4,000 in the last election, five years ago. Voting in the election arose in states with large Salvadoran communities, such as Virginia, California, and New York.
The five opposition presidential candidates have won almost no support in polls, including contenders from the right-wing Arena and the left-wing FMLN party, which has dominated Salvadoran politics for 30 years.