I didn’t bother to preview yesterday’s election (Sunday in the Americas) in El Salvador, since there was no doubt about the result. And sure enough, incumbent president Nayib Bukele was re-elected by a huge margin: with 70.3% of the vote counted he has almost five-sixths of it, or 83.1%. None of his five opponents has reached double figures; Manuel Flores of the left-wing FMLN is doing best with 7.0%.
In most countries numbers like that would indicate an authoritarian regime, but that’s not quite the problem in El Salvador. FMLN and the right-wing ARENA (whose candidate, Joel Sánchez, has 6.1%) are genuine opposition parties who in turn governed the country for 25 years. But their vote collapsed at the 2019 presidential election, and even more so at the 2021 legislative election. It has not recovered.
The most questionable aspect of this election is the fact that Bukele was on the ballot at all. The constitution limits presidents to a single term, but after winning a huge legislative majority he proceeded to stack the supreme court with his nominees, and they obligingly ruled that running for re-election was quite OK. With that reassurance, Bukele last year accepted renomination from his party, New Ideas.
Bukele is a broadly centrist populist who bases his appeal on the claim – no doubt correct – that the old political establishment is hopelessly corrupt and has allowed organised crime to flourish. His war against crime gangs appears to have had some success, although at the price of human rights concerns. His economic policies have been less successful, including a controversial adoption of bitcoin as legal tender in 2021.
There’s little doubt of Bukele’s genuine popularity, and he is right to point out that single-term limits are rare in developed countries. But if he wanted to make that argument he should have done it by proposing a constitutional amendment, not by legal chicanery. We’ve seen in many places the way that evading or over-riding term limits opens the door to authoritarian rule, and the danger of El Salvador going the same way seems very real.
On the other hand, the news from El Salvador’s larger neighbor is much better. Last year’s presidential election in Guatemala saw a surprise win for centre-left candidate Bernardo Arévalo, who took 60.9% of the vote in the second round. But with nearly five months between the election and the inauguration, there was plenty of time for the country’s establishment to try out a range of dirty tricks to overturn the result.
Given Guatemala’s history of oligarchical and authoritarian rule, there was a good deal of pessimism about Arévalo’s chances of actually taking office. But he and his supporters held firm, backed by key institutions as well as the international community, and he was sworn in just after midnight on 15 January – last-minute obstruction in Congress succeeded in delaying the event only by a few hours. His predecessor, Alejandro Giammattei, in Trumpy fashion declined to attend.
As the Reuters report puts it, Arévalo “has cast himself as a democracy advocate and the leader of a progressive movement bent on reshaping a political landscape long dominated by conservative parties.” It looks as if he’ll have his work cut out.
The World is Not Enough 