By Charles Call
On Sunday, 37 year-old anti-establishment candidate, Nayib Bukele won the presidency of El Salvador. Alongside Venezuela’s crisis and the tensions with Mexico over immigration, the vote in this tiny country may seem insignificant.
First, Bukele’s election shows the continued rise of populism and the decline of traditional parties. Stable two-party systems have fallen apart in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Honduras in the last two decades.
El Salvador’s has had perhaps the most stable such system since the 1980s, and Bukele has now broken it. And he did so resoundingly with 53 percent of the vote—a first-round victory greater than all other candidates combined. Bukele is the first candidate to win the presidency in 30 years who is not from the parties associated with the country’s brutal civil war—the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), still led largely by demobilized guerrillas. As Bukele himself noted, his victory marks the end not just of the two-party system but of a post-war period dominated by the war’s main protagonists.
But Bukele’s emergence is even more unusual than newcomers in other countries. His campaign relied almost entirely on social media and his informal, millennial style (he appeared in blue jeans and a leather jacket for his victory speech).
He did not energetically campaign around the country and refused to participate in a traditional debate. Instead he relied mainly on Twitter and Facebook, reaching millions of young people and engaging them through social media.
Bukele built on his legacy as mayor of the capital city, where he was known mainly for delivering visible changes to public infrastructure. His campaign emphasized that quality goods like education, health, and parks should be available not just to the rich but to everyday citizens.
Bukele used populist rhetoric to denounce the establishment. For instance, in December he “attentively” asked, with “all due decorum, that you bastards return what’s been stolen!” His anti-corruption campaign struck a nerve in a country where three former presidents have recently been indicted for corruption and one is in jail. On election night, he appeared with a former attorney general of Guatemala best known for having successfully prosecuted (and thereby ousting) the president and vice president there in 2015.
Bukele has promised to set up an international anti-corruption mission to help El Salvador’s attorney general prosecute more cases of corruption. Part of the popularity (91 percent in one poll) of this proposal is the possibility that it may deal serious blows to corruption-tied elites, as a similar U.N.-backed mission has done in Guatemala. In a hemisphere where former presidents are under investigation or convicted in Brazil (two of them), Peru (four!), Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama, Bukele’s election reinforces the dynamic of electorates fed up with corrupt political elites. It also underscores the importance of strengthening prosecutors’ capacities and independence, a key factor in the successful corruption cases across the hemisphere.
The social media-savvy president-elect still has a tough road to deliver on his vision. After his own party was not permitted to contest the election, he reached an agreement to run under the banner of the Grand Alliance for National Unity, known for its ties to corruption.
That party and an allied party hold only 11 of the 84 seats in the National Assembly. ARENA holds 37 seats, and the FMLN 23 seats for the two years remaining before the next legislative elections.
Bukele’s success until then will thus depend on his ability to forge ties with other parties, convince legislators to defect to his party, and/or negotiate with the opposition. In addition, even though young people showed enthusiasm for his candidacy, overall disillusion with politics remains, as indicated by a drop in the voting rate by 8 percentage points to 52 percent.
Some observers are also concerned that Bukele’s populism may bleed into authoritarian behavior. He may have skirted laws in contracting out important infrastructure projects as mayor. He has bristled at checks on his conduct, whether instigated by the attorney general or the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, denouncing such efforts as the establishment’s resistance to exposure. In addition, his campaign relied on few known experts, creating anxiety about how qualified his cabinet appointments will be.
The voting itself was peaceful, with only two (non-electorally related) homicides reported on election day. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal announced 87 percent of the results by 10 pm, and the two traditional parties congratulated Bukele promptly.
Time will tell if the trend toward more anti-establishment, anti-corruption governments in the hemisphere will accelerate. And the next five years will show whether the millennial can deliver on citizens’ high expectations.
An abridged version of the story culled from Brookings Institute Publication
