After a highly controversial first term, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was re-elected on Feb. 4 with a staggering 85% of the vote. Despite presidents being unable to officially run for consecutive terms, the founder of the New Ideas Party stakes his claim over the presidency with major public backing. 

In 2019, the former San Salvador mayor ran on a tough-on-crime platform, hoping to curb the nation’s rising murder rate. The country was fresh off of a major corruption scandal in which former president Salvador Sánchez Cerén was indicted in a case that alleged mismanagement of $351 million in government funds. Salvadorians were eager for a change in the status quo, and Bukele was the answer they came up with. 

What Bukele represents runs much deeper than a simple desire for change, and encompasses wider social trends in the country. Dr. Sharon Lean, chair of Wayne State’s Political Science Department believes that Bukele is a symbol for hope in an increasingly polarizing world. 

“He’s really appealing to the masses who haven’t really been well represented. There’s real reasons why they want an alternative. One of the characteristics of the region has been this enormous disparity between rich and poor and between browner-skinned and lighter-skinned people. Bukele are effectively blurring some of those boundaries,” Lean said.

But this new brand of populism has not come without its fair share of problems, including ongoing human rights concerns surrounding Bukele’s no-tolerance approach to policing. Through a declaration of emergency, Bukele has been able to suspend many of the country’s civil liberties in an effort to curb gang violence. This move has brought about the arrests of over 66,000 people since the emergency order was introduced in March 2022, making the country of six million the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Human rights organizations around the world allege wrongful imprisonment, unfair criminal proceedings, and cite the deaths of over 153 inmates as evidence of abuse. 

While successful thus far, Lean believes that Bukele is setting potentially dangerous precedent that could open up the country’s highest institution to increased corruption and constitutional impropriety.

“He was never supposed to be able to run for a second term, but the constitutional court, which he staffed, said if you step down for two weeks, then you can run again. The problem when you tinker with those types of rulemaking institutions is that they’re good for you at the moment, but once you’ve changed them, they apply to the next person as well,” Lean said.

Bukele’s running mate, Félix Ulloa, has already left the possibility of changing the constitution to allow a third term open, further troubling democratic experts. Evan Bitzarakis, a Wayne State graduate student studying Latin American constitutional changes, believes this was set in motion in 2021 when Bukele was allowed to run again.

“It seems the damage was done in 2021 when the constitutional court allowed him to run again, in pretty clear contravention of the Salvadoran constitutions’ prohibition on presidents serving consecutive terms. The counterargument is that Bukele is immensely popular among the Salvadoran electorate,” Bitzarakis said.

While it seems clear that Bukele will remain in power for the next five years, what lies beyond is almost solely in the hands of Salvadorians and the direction they envision for the country.