El Salvador Celebrates Likely Reelection Of ‘World’s Coolest Dictator’

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Salvadorans packed the capital’s central square Sunday evening to celebrate the expected reelection of Nayib Bukele as president even before any official results were announced.

With soaring approval ratings and virtually no competition, Nayib Bukele was almost certainly headed for a second 5-year term as president. After voting, he jousted with reporters, asserting that the election’s results would serve as a “referendum” on his administration.

Two hours after polling places closed, and without any official returns announced, Bukele said on the platform X that “according to our numbers” he had won. Preliminary official results were not expected before late Sunday.

Many voters expressed willingness Sunday to forego some elements of democracy if it means keeping gang violence at bay.

El Salvador’s constitution prohibits reelection. But a fter his party was victorious in 2021 legislative elections, the newly elected congress purged the country’s constitutional court, replacing judges with loyalists. They later ruled that Bukele could run for a second term. Critics say he has chipped away at the country’s system of checks and balances.

On Sunday night, Bukele’s face was plastered on much of downtown San Salvador’s main square, on flags, shirts and life-size billboard cutouts.

Delya Rodriguez joined hundreds of people already celebrating in San Salvador’s main plaza, wearing a T-shirt with Bukele’s face on it reading “Everyone for re-election.”

“I consider myself a Bukele fan,” Rodríguez said. “This is the first time that I am the fan of a party.”

The chicken farmer said she had never seen El Salvador’s traditional parties do anything for people like her, and brushed off criticisms of the leader.

“He is a historically singular and different president,” she said.

Bukele’s administration has arrested more than 76,000 people since a gang crackdown began in March 2022. The massive arrests have been criticized for a lack of due process, but Salvadorans have retaken their neighborhoods long controlled by gangs.

José Dionisio Serrano, 60, was proud to be the first person in line at 6 a.m. Sunday as voters started to wait outside a school in the formerly gang-controlled neighborhood of Zacamil in Mejicanos just north of San Salvador. The soccer teacher said he planned to vote for Bukele and his party New Ideas.

“We need to keep changing, transforming,” Serrano said. “Honestly, we have lived through very hard periods in my life. As a citizen I have lived through periods of war, and this situation we had with the gangs. Now we have a big opportunity for our country. I want the generations that are coming up to live in a better world.”

Mejicanos was historically divided between two gangs most of Serrano’s life, and he had to flee for several years after gang members shot him and threatened his life. Asked about concerns that Bukele was seeking reelection despite a constitutional ban, he brushed it aside, saying, “What the people want is something else.”

El Salvador’s traditional parties from the left and right that created the vacuum that Bukele first filled in 2019 remain in shambles. Alternating in power for some three decades, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) were thoroughly discredited by their own corruption and ineffectiveness. Their presidential candidates this year were polling in the low single digits.

Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” has gained fame for his brutal crackdown on gangs, in which more than 1% of the country’s population has been arrested.

On Sunday afternoon, Bukele waded through a crowd of supporters to vote wearing a blue golf shirt and white baseball cap.

Smiling, Bukele and his wife dropped their ballots into the box as R.E.M.’s 1987 hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” blared over speakers. Bukele has a habit of trolling his critics.

Shortly after casting his vote, Bukele said at a news conference that it was important to elect a Legislative Assembly that will continue approving the state of emergency that has given him extraordinary powers to combat the gangs.

Bukele said the vote could be seen as a “referendum”…