SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s Legislative Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Lawmaker Ana Figueroa from the New Ideas party had proposed the changes to five articles of the constitution. The proposal also included eliminating the second round of the election where the two top vote-getters from the first round face off.
New Ideas and its allies in the Legislative Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 to allow reelection to a second five-year term.
Observers have worried that Bukele had a plan to consolidate power since at least 2021, when a newly elected Congress with a strong governing party majority voted to remove the magistrates of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court. Those justices had been seen as the last check on the popular president.
Since then, Bukele has only grown more popular. The Biden administration’s initial expressions of concern gave way to quiet acceptance as Bukele announced his run for reelection. With the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House in January, Bukele had a new powerful ally and quickly offered Trump help by taking more than 200 deportees from other countries into a newly built prison for gang members.
Figueroa argued Thursday that federal lawmakers and mayors can already seek reelection as many times as they want.
“All of them have had the possibility of reelection through popular vote, the only exception until now has been the presidency,” Figueroa said.
She also proposed that Bukele’s current term, scheduled to end June 1, 2029, instead finish June 1, 2027, to put presidential and congressional elections on the same schedule. It would also allow Bukele to seek reelection to a longer term two years earlier.
Marcela Villatoro of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), one of three votes against the proposals, told her fellow lawmakers that “Democracy in El Salvador has died!”
“You don’t realize what indefinite reelection brings: It brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy … there’s corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and halts democracy and political participation,” she said.
Suecy Callejas, the assembly’s vice president, said that “power has returned to the only place that it truly belongs … to the Salvadoran people.”
Bukele did not immediately comment.
Bukele, who once dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” is highly popular, largely because of his heavy-handed fight against the country’s powerful street gangs.
Voters have been willing to overlook evidence that his administration like others before it had negotiated with the gangs, before seeking a state of emergency that suspended some constitutional rights and allowed authorities to arrest and jail tens of thousands of people.
His success with security and politically has inspired imitators in the region who seek to replicate his style.
Most recently, Bukele’s government has faced international criticism for the arrests of high-profile lawyers who have been outspoken critics of his administration. One of the country’s most prominent human rights group announced in July it was moving its operations out of El Salvador for the safety of its people, accusing the government of a “wave of repression.”
