Bukele’s crooked electoral rules

Few things bother Nayib Bukele, his henchmen and his followers as much as being told that a dictatorship is being set up in El Salvador. It bothers them so much that in the year before his unconstitutional re-election he felt compelled to organize international events, such as the Central American and Caribbean Games and the Miss Universe pageant, to show the world a Manichean reality which basically meant to say: if we lived in a dictatorship, could we do this?

History in El Salvador shows that the answer is yes. What’s more, Bukele is not the first to use sport and beauty to clean up his image; military governments did so in the past, who also believed in force as the only way to solve the problems of the small Central American country. And democracy is a concept so poorly explained, badly understood and, for many people in El Salvador, so useless, that it is easy to believe that elections like the one coming up on Sunday, February 4, are free and democratic. Calling elections and having an opposition instead of imposing a single candidate sounds very democratic, but the trick is in the small print.

The main example of how undemocratic the elections are going to be is Bukele’s own run for re-election. In the democratic version of El Salvador, explained in the Constitution of the Republic, there is an explicit prohibition for incumbent presidents to compete for a consecutive term. The Magna Carta says it in six different articles. There is no room for interpretation. Bukele himself, 10 years ago when he began his career as a politician, was very clear about it. He also had that same clarity in 2019, right after taking office: “I am going to leave the presidency at 42 years of age,” he said in an interview, asked if he would seek re-election. But he forgot all about it when, according to statements by his vice president, Bukele found in 2021 a “hidden article” that gave him the option to run for re-election, even though it had blocked the president who preceded him from doing the same. Re-election is so synonymous with dictatorship that the only president in the history of El Salvador who was re-elected before Bukele was Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the dictator who ruled for 11 years between 1933 and 1944.

In a democracy where there is separation of powers, for the president of the Republic to interpret the Constitution as he pleases is a move that the judiciary is responsible for putting a stop to. But the division of powers is so non-existent that Bukelism also controls it. In May 2021, when Nuevas Ideas, Bukele’s party, won the absolute majority in the Legislative Assembly, the first thing it did upon taking office was to dismiss the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and impose his own. As every autocrat’s guidebook dictates, the president justified the decision by invoking an article of the Constitution that awards that power “for specific causes, previously established by law.”

The judges, who presented their resignation under threats and police intimidation outside their homes, were “guilty” of having reversed measures imposed by the president to contain the pandemic, such as the arrest of people for breaking the home quarantine. The Chamber justified its decision by clarifying that the Health Code should not be interpreted “under any circumstances in terms of punitive power in the hands of the State.” It was an exceptional regime that, contrary to the current one, did have restrictions due to the violation of fundamental rights that it entailed. Bukele doesn’t like being told that he can’t do things the way he wants. And that is why there is no Prosecutor’s Office to remind him of the limitations of his power and to investigate the corruption of his own circle. He also imposed his own people there.

Bukele and his deputies were democratically elected, yes, but that does not mean that they have unlimited power, as evidenced by the democracy in which they believe. The fact that they were voted in does not give them carte blanche to change the laws at will, but rather to guarantee that the actions of the State correspond to the interests of the people they represent. Bukele may be very popular, but the results that have brought him there are based on the destruction of democratic institutions, the blocking of access to public information, the cancellation of fundamental rights and the harassment of the independent press. Each and every one is a trait of a dictatorship, no matter how cool Bukele may look on social networks and on television.

In a country where everything is governed and directed by the same person, there is no democracy even if the vote is “free”; that freedom is also a fallacy. In June 2023, Bukele decided that in order to accumulate more power, the rules of the electoral game would be changed. He reorganized the political division of the country (from 262 municipalities to 44), reduced the number of lawmakers (from 84 to 60; his party currently has 56), and changed the formula for counting votes. All this was prohibited by the Electoral Code, which establishes that changes cannot be made less than a year before the election, but that was not a problem, because lawmakers had already decided to repeal the Code in March, three months earlier.

The Supreme Electoral Court, which in theory is independent, has also not been a guarantor that the conditions for exercising the vote will be respected, much less that conditions for the competing candidates are equal. Although this is the only institution where Bukele has not dismissed anyone, the magistrates do not dare to go against him either, even if the position requires them to. What exists in El Salvador, on the other hand, is a blind, deaf and mute electoral judge who watches the use of public funds and institutions to campaign too early, call for the vote and take advantage of the position to request it. This is how we have seen TikToks posted by the vice president of the Assembly asking for the vote “for the N” to “continue giving governability to President Bukele”; we have also witnessed the massive delivery of food packages just a few days before the elections and the unnecessary deployment of the Armed Forces as a form of intimidation.

It is an unwritten law, but proven in practice, that anyone who dares to go against Bukele's will will be reprimanded. While in a democracy, dissent is respected, in an authoritarian and dictatorial regime, it is punished and silenced.

The dictatorship may not seem like a dictatorship if Leo Messi fills a stadium in a friendly match between Inter Miami and the El Salvador national team where the cheapest tickets cost $200, and if videos by influencers flourish on YouTube praising the model that all of Latin America wants to replicate. If the supposed democracy is based on the fear of being persecuted, it is a dictatorship. Without counterweights to limit power and ensure that constitutional guarantees are respected for all, democracy is a lie that protects me today, but may be taken away tomorrow, because rights are whimsical and not obligatory.

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