You might have seen people posting on social media the following phrase, “X pais necesita un Bukele.” “X country needs a Bukele.” You might even agree with it. I don’t intend to change your mind with this humble little article.
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s popularity across Latin America led many of us to believe that he would run away with his reelection. And he did. What many of us didn’t account for was how he would do so. Even a supporter of Bukele would admit that the election itself can only be described as a hot mess, like dropping salsa and curtido all over your crisp white selecta jersey.
Election day was littered with irregularities and disorganization. This all occurred against a backdrop of what the leftist opposition described as election engineering over the past year.
Let’s start with Bukele declaring himself the winner on the evening of election day. No surprise here. No one thought he had a chance of losing, even after leftist candidate Manuel Flores had a last-minute surge in popularity after the internet turned him into a meme.
What was unusual was that Bukele claimed that he and his party won the election with over 85% of the vote in his victory speech. This was at the end of the night when only a portion of the votes had been reported. The final percentage was 84% after all the ballots were counted and reported weeks later. Eerily accurate of “El Presi.”
On election night many irregularities were reported by social media sleuths and journalists alike. It was difficult to understand how and why the election procedure was so chaotic, especially when the president and his party were predicted to win by a landslide.
To help me wade through the murky waters of this election, I spoke to my friend Nicola Chavez, a PhD student who broke down the election process on her social media accounts.
“What seems like ineptitude and weaponized incompetence at so many different levels,” Chavez says to me via my computer screen, “only really makes sense if you zoom out and you see it all happening at the same time.”
Take for example the recent reforms to reduce the number of municipalities (from over 260 to only 40) and the number of seats in the legislative assembly (from 84 to 60). These electoral reforms passed within the past year. It is usually illegal to do this right before an election year, in order to prevent tipping the scales one way or another.
“And of course [the municipios] all rearranged at al antojo — to the liking — of the ruling political elite,” Nicola says. “They say okay, if we put [the city] San Salvador next to Mejicanos, that’s going to [Bukele’s] Nuevas Ideas. But if we put it next to Cuscatancingo, that’s not going to us.” It is a form of gerrymandering. They are manipulating the boundary lines to ensure Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party maximizes its odds in places where they may be weaker. The elections for municipalities will be held in March.
Bukele’s party claimed 58 legislators before the official results were announced. In the final tally, they received 54 out of the 60 possible seats. The leftist FMLN party, despite coming in second place for president, received 0 legislators. Nicola explained to me that there were changes to the model by which popular representation is allocated. In other words, literally using a mathematical formula to decide the proportion of representatives based on the number of votes, which — surprise, surprise — actually leads to less proportional results.
Compare this to the prior system, established in 1991, which divides the number of legislators by the population according to the most recent census. This is the cociente or quotient. Then the number of inhabitants per departamento (or state) that fits within the cociente is the number representatives that departamento receives.
If your eyes glazed over, don’t worry. I nearly fell asleep writing it myself. What you need to know is that this system gave smaller parties more opportunities to fill seats in the legislative assembly and made it very unlikely, though not impossible, for any one party to have a supermajority.
The final change was to the election results reporting process. Before, a team of up to four people per voting center was empowered by the electoral authority to set up a laptop and scanner. At the end of the night, they would upload and submit the tallies of all the ballots cast across tables in their particular center.
This year, each table in a voting center was responsible for setting up their own tech to upload and submit the tallies from their particular ballot box. This creates an opportunity to mess things up exponentially because there are multiple tables per voting center. On top of that, the tech was not loaded with official tally forms, so at the end of the night, people were submitting photographs of random hand-tallied sheets. “And this feels like really intentional chaos,” Nicola says.
By the end of election night, not even the preliminary results for the assembly could be submitted. Voting centers closed at 2 a.m. and all the ballots were sent across the country to go through a “final scrutiny” at a later date at the National Gymnasium of San Salvador.
There are many more irregularities that I don’t have time to explore here, but have been reported on by other media outlets in El Salvador and internationally.
Now you might ask yourself, why would the most popular president in Latin America need to intentionally manipulate the process to ensure that his party has a supermajority? Why would he need to steal something he should, in theory, already have won? The answer is obvious to some. To others, these are just the cries of losers.
One thing we must keep in mind is that this is the first election to take place under the state of exception since the Civil War. We must also keep in mind that technically, he ran unconstitutionally — and the highest electoral body let him.
So what, you might think? The people love him and they have given him absolute power.
The question I’ve found myself asking is, now what?
One thing is for certain: Popularity doesn’t last forever (unless you’re Beyonce). Imagine that years from now, Bukele and his party begin to lose favor. Maybe due to an economic crash. Or a massive volcanic eruption. Or maybe the honeymoon period simply ends. What democratic mechanisms will the people of El Salvador have to choose a different path?
For better or for worse, Bukele is the future.