MEXICO CITY – In his first two years in office, the president of El Salvador marched soldiers for the country’s legislature, challenged Supreme Court decisions, published photos of poorly dressed gang members huddled on the floor of a prison and dispatched military personnel to stop anyone who broke the quarantine.
Salvadorans don’t get tired of it. President Nayib Bukele, who has an approval rating of about 90 percent in the polls, is expected to further expand his mandate in Sunday’s legislative elections, which could represent a decisive victory for his party.
The vote can also endow Bukele with new, comprehensive powers: control over a legislature that has been dominated by the opposition, along with the chance to start changing the constitution and possibly remaking the government in its image. If your party and its allies win two-thirds of the seats, they can replace the attorney general and appoint new judges for the Supreme Court.
In an interview, Bukele’s vice president, Felix Ulloa, acknowledged that some of the president’s actions were questionable.
“The president had some explosions,” acknowledged Ulloa, “but they must be understood as such, as explosions, as errors, and not as a trend, as an attitude, as the birth of a new dictatorship”.
Bukele’s tendency towards confrontation will be moderate, Ulloa said, once he has a legislature that is not determined to block his agenda. He invited the world to evaluate the president based on how he governs after the election.
“We will be able to assess the true character of this government, whether it is a democratic government serving the interests of the Salvadoran people,” said Ulloa. “If, on the contrary, it turns out that the president is, as is claimed, an authoritarian who wants to concentrate power and impose an anti-democratic model, then that too will come to the fore.”
Part of what caught Bukele’s attention is his approach, which can only be described as very online. A 39-year-old political outsider who calls himself the President, charms followers by tracking his enemies on Twitter and revealing his triumphs on TikTok. He uses social media to destroy the El Salvador press, attack the attorney general and declare his refusal to abide by Supreme Court decisions.
And while Bukele helped El Salvador to control the spread of the coronavirus better than many of its neighbors, he drew international condemnation of human rights groups for his displays of strong man and the repressive measures taken during the pandemic.
Last year, he sent soldiers to the legislature to try to pressure lawmakers to approve a loan to finance law enforcement. (Vice President Ulloa called the deployment “an error.”)
Bukele also sent soldiers and police to detain people who broke the quarantine in so-called containment centers – and then ignored several orders from the Supreme Court to stop the practice. And he drew a lot of criticism for posting pictures of prisoners huddled in their underwear.
Critics fear that if he gains unrestricted control over the country after Sunday’s election, he will show even less restraint.
“The fear is that it will concentrate the powers of the State. There will be no real judicial or legislative independence and there will be no way to limit its power, ”said Mari Carmen Aponte, ambassador to El Salvador in the Obama administration.
Bukele’s relationship with the Biden government did not start well. The Associated Press reported in February that the Salvadoran president flew to Washington and asked to meet with government officials, but was rejected.
The embarrassing episode highlighted the test that Biden’s victory represented for leaders like Bukele.
Under the Trump administration, managing relations with the United States was simple: as long as Bukele and his colleagues in Central America fulfilled Trump’s immigration agenda, they could expect little interference from their northern neighbor when they made provocative moves at home.
The new occupants of the White House sent a very different message. Days after the inauguration, Juan Gonzalez, Biden’s top advisor for Latin America, made a compelling assessment in an interview with El Faro, a Salvadoran news site.
“We will have our differences with the Bukele government,” said Gonzalez. “And we will express concerns in a respectful and well-intentioned manner.”
Apprehension over Bukele reverberated in Washington when it became clear how his party could perform in Sunday’s elections.
“Here is a guy who did not observe basic democratic norms and you gave him uncontrolled power,” said former Obama adviser Dan Restrepo in an interview. “Uncontrolled power rarely ends well in the region, and instability can only increase migratory pressure, which is of no interest to anyone.”
For Salvadorans accustomed to generations of political leaders who defended democracy from the outside while enriching themselves with the public, Bukele’s transgressions don’t seem to matter much.
The president avoided an overflow of coronavirus cases in hospitals and distributed money to poor Salvadorans to ease the pain of the economic crisis. And while local media reported that a sharp drop in murders under the Bukele government resulted from a government deal with criminal gangs, many Salvadorans are happy to have a break from the violence.
“People can write about Bukele’s dangers, but the reason it doesn’t resonate with people is that they say, ‘How does it feed me? This reduces the crime rate how? ‘”Said Tim Muth, who served as an election observer in El Salvador and writes a blog about the country’s politics.
“The Salvadoran public, in the final analysis, may be deciding that everything is fine,” he added, “because this guy is delivering a certain set of things to us.”
In Chalatenango, a small town north of the capital, Bukele’s supporters were enthusiastic about the prospect of their president consolidating power and the decline of the political parties that had led the country for decades.
“People woke up and realized what we were experiencing all these years. No longer. We want change, ”said Armando Gil, 59, a car salesman.
Mr. Gil was a longtime supporter of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, but he was disgusted by the repeated corruption scandals involving “people who deceived us”.
He voted for Bukele in 2019 and believes that the president’s opponents are frustrated that they cannot control him.
“He is not working for the small minority that has always governed and dominated our country,” said Gil. “This is what they don’t like.”
Nelson Renteria Meza contributed reporting from Chalatenango, El Salvador.