How Nayib Bukele is breaking presidential term limits in El Salvador

AT MIDNIGHT ON November 30th Nayib Bukele stepped back from the presidency of El Salvador to run again in elections in February. The six months between now and June 1st, the date of the inauguration, may be the only period for a long time that he is not at the helm of the Central American country. The constitution bars presidents from serving a second consecutive term. But the 42-year-old has arranged an impressive show to suggest that his bid for re-election is legal. He is the first person to run for re-election since Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, a military dictator, did in 1939. How is Mr Bukele subverting term limits, and will he succeed?

Some of his stratagems are blatantly illegal. No fewer than six articles of the constitution ban a second consecutive term. But in 2021 Mr Bukele appointed new judges to the constitutional court. It swiftly reinterpreted the articles, ruling that a president could run again should he step back from the presidency six months before the inauguration. His interim role seems barely distinguishable from his presidential one. Mr Bukele will keep his security detail, official residences and cars, among other things. The legislature, dominated by his party, granted him permission to campaign.

Mr Bukele ignored a constitutional requirement to appoint delegates to rule in his absence upon taking power. And rather than submit three candidates to the Legislative Assembly, which is supposed to choose the one to serve in his absence, on November 30th he forwarded just one name, that of Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara, his private secretary, who had worked for the family advertising business. The legislature duly appointed her. Mr Bukele will probably continue to rule, says Malcolm Cartagena, an electoral expert.

Mr Bukele will win the election without fraud. A poll in August found that almost 70% of Salvadoreans intend to vote for him. His approval rating has long been sky-high, partly thanks to his publicity stunts. On the night he stepped down, Mr Bukele appeared on national television to lay the foundation stone for a stadium to be built with Chinese money. Two days earlier, at a televised cabinet meeting, he asked the attorney-general to investigate his ministers for corruption. “I don’t want to be remembered as a president who didn’t steal but was surrounded by thieves,” he said. (There is ample evidence of corruption within his government).

Illegality and stunts aside, Mr Bukele has made a difference to people’s lives. The murder rate was falling before he took power. But he cracked down on crime starting in March 2022, which caused violence to plummet. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Salvadoreans have been freed from the stranglehold of gangs that for years have extorted money from them. Mr Bukele’s crackdown violates human rights: NGOs have documented cases of torture and death in custody. But that has not made the policy or the president less popular. “We don’t want to accept that this is a dictatorship,” says Mario Jiménez, a 29-year-old market vendor. “It is somewhat disguised, but we’re heading that way.”

Mr Bukele’s disdain for the rules will not abate if he wins a second term. In 2021 he won a super-majority in the assembly, but has since strengthened his control by gerrymandering. That means parties other than his own New Ideas may be wiped out in next year’s elections. He has appointed loyalists to crucial jobs that are supposed to be independent of the presidency, such as attorney-general, and replaced a third of judges with people friendly to him. If the youthful Mr Bukele wins a second term he is bound to find a way to run for a third, a fourth and beyond.