A few months after President Nayib Bukele compromised the independence of justice in El Salvador through authoritarian turns, the Constitutional Chamber that he installed authorized his immediate presidential re-election on Friday night, crossing a line that critics of the project New Ideas - the president's party - had warned with concern. The Salvadoran Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced this Saturday that it will comply with the order of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice that registration be allowed to compete for a presidential re-election with the sole condition that the acting president resigns. six months before the mandate.
Thus, Bukele aims to be reelected in 2024 using a court ruling to consolidate his political project, as Daniel Ortega did in Nicaragua in 2011. The difference is that the Sandinista president alleged that the constitutional prohibition of reelection "violated his human rights" and the Bukele's justice invoked the people to "decide without undue pressure or coercion."
More news
El Salvador: demolishing judicial independence
An investigation sheds new evidence of Bukele's negotiation with El Salvador's gangs
Nayib Bukele retires a third of El Salvador's 690 judges
Until now, and according to the country's Constitution, the presidents of El Salvador, who have a five-year term, could not renew it for an immediate period. However, the Constitutional Chamber installed last May by Bukele rolled over article 152 of the Magna Carta, which states that “anyone who has held the Presidency of the Republic for more than six months, consecutive or not, cannot be a candidate for president. , during the immediately preceding period, or within the last six months prior to the presidential term ”.
Although the presidential reelection was something that was being considered in El Salvador, taking into account Bukele's claws to justice, dismissing magistrates through the National Assembly and recently a third of the judges and prosecutors, what is surprising is the speed with which the president strengthens his political project branded as authoritarian by his detractors.
“The Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador — which Bukele cooperated in May of this year — has just allowed Bukele to run for reelection.
The same script used by Daniel Ortega and Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras.
Democracy in El Salvador is on the brink of the abyss, ”said José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch.
Join EL PAÍS now to follow all the news and read without limits
Subscribe here
Vivanco exposed the duality of the ruling party, bringing up a tweet from the Vice President of El Salvador, Félix Ulloa, who in 2020 said "I have never proposed nor would I agree with continued reelection in our country."
Ulloa is appointed by Bukele to reform 196 of the 272 articles of the current Magna Carta.
After knowing the authorization of his re-election, until the publication of this article, Bukele has remained silent on his Twitter account.
However, some of its officials and deputies from the ruling New Ideas party applauded the ruling and encouraged his re-election.
In Friday's ruling, the magistrates order the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to allow "a person who exercises the Presidency of the Republic and has not been president in the immediately preceding period to participate in the electoral contest for a second time."
According to the judges, said 2014 interpretation of reelection is “wrong” and they pointed out that, in their opinion, the Constitution allows a citizen to be president for a maximum of 10 years. On May 1, the Legislative Assembly, with a large pro-government majority, dismissed the constitutional magistrates and appointed five lawyers to occupy the positions. The international community criticized this action as a blow against the separation of powers and judicial independence. The alarms have materialized with reelection, a practice that in Central America has serious consequences.
Although this is not exactly the case of the Constitutional Court, in El Salvador, last August the Inter-American Court of Human Rights published an advisory opinion, establishing that non-reelection implies human rights violations. And, in general, the re-election establishes: “The interdependence between democracy, the rule of law and the protection of human rights is the basis of any system (…) The principles of representative democracy include, in addition to the periodicity of elections and political pluralism, the obligations to prevent a person from perpetuating himself in power, and to guarantee the alternation of power and the separation of powers ”.
Bukele, 40, enjoys a high level of popularity, which allowed him to reach the presidency in 2019, giving the coup de grace to the bipartisanship represented by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). Like others who have been reelected, like Ortega in Nicaragua, Bukele has used his popularity and the majority in Parliament to implode democracy, his critics compare. Justice has been the main bastion bent by Bukele to guarantee his continuity in power without counterweights.
“We are witnessing leaps and bounds at the end of the Republic and its replacement by an undemocratic family clan that uses the State to their advantage.
But in order for them to achieve their objectives, unworthy, opportunistic or corrupt officials and bureaucrats are needed to work in their favor, and a citizenry blinded by propaganda, "the digital newspaper El Faro warned in an editorial, after knowing the decision to automatically retire a third of the judges and prosecutors.
Subscribe here
to the
EL PAÍS América
newsletter
and receive all the information keys on the region's current affairs