Nayib Bukele: everything for a slogan, everything for power

El Salvador celebrates this Sunday the most boring elections on the regional scene.

The margin of surprise is almost zero.

The president, Nayib Bukele, will be re-elected with embarrassing percentages after the Supreme Court, made up of like-minded judges, reinterpreted the articles of the Constitution that prohibit consecutive terms.

At the same time, the political moment of the Central American country arouses global interest due to the worrying authoritarian drift that began during the war against gangs and also because it is an attractive subject of study for any semiologist or analyst.

Bukele, with 5.8 million followers, has governed through social networks since his first day in power, in 2019. From X, formerly Twitter, he disposes and attacks.

The president gave his first orders with a cell phone: do it, execute it, say goodbye.

And that continues today to be the platform of his permanent rally.

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/CkQ5VmyR48

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 25, 2024

Virtual biographies usually say a lot beyond their literal meaning.

Until Saturday, Bukele presented himself as nothing less than a “philosopher king,” in reference to the rulers of Plato's

Republic

.

He writes it in English,

Philosopher King

, like much of his messages.

The Salvadoran president likes allusions to philosophical paradigms, although in the end everything boils down to a hodgepodge of slogans and supposed formulas to achieve success.

His profile photograph, changed on January 24, portrays him browsing

The Incal,

the cosmic journey of the cartoonist Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

And the background image is a large deployment of troops, a tribute to his security policy, which managed to contain the advance of the Mara Salvatrucha and the El Barrio 18 gang at the cost of a profound deterioration of human rights.

January is one day away from closing as the safest month in the entire history of El Salvador.

God first.

https://t.co/dwG7CicBtS

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 31, 2024

Militarization, prisons and order are Bukele's obsessions and, probably, the main reason for his popularity in a country historically hit by violence.

The displays of prisoners crowded in inhumane conditions mark his mandate and his

timeline

since he broke off negotiations with the gangs.

And today he continues to remind Salvadorans that this is the axis of his project: “With just one less deputy we would put the war against gangs at risk, because the emergency regime could not be approved or magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice could be elected. nor to the attorney general (...).

That means that with just one less deputy the opposition will be able to achieve its true and only plan: free the gang members and occupy them to return to power.”

A message to the Salvadorans 🇸🇻 pic.twitter.com/G3xE3gkOxM

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) January 22, 2024

Added to this type of punitive populism are the attacks against the Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN) and ARENA, the traditional left and right parties that are on the path to probable disappearance;

humanitarian organizations, foreign leaders such as the Colombian Gustavo Petro and the press, another of the president's obsessions.

The harassment of journalists and workers at

El Faro,

which had to transfer its administrative operations to Costa Rica, is constant.

“All those media outlets, financed by Open Society (Soros), that are putting out those 'reports', coordinated to come out just the week before the elections;

They only show that these so-called 'journalists' are nothing more than political activists,” he said.

All those media outlets, financed by Open Society (Soros), that are publishing these “reports”, coordinated to come out just the week before the elections;

They only show that these supposed “journalists” are nothing more than political activists.

Anyone with 3 fingers of…

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 1, 2024

The “coolest president

”

or “the coolest dictator

in

the world,” as Bukele himself has sometimes presented himself, seeks this Sunday to eternalize his mark.

In a 2017 propaganda video he invited people to join his party, Nuevas Ideas, sitting on a light upholstered sofa with a painting behind him.

This week he sat in the same place again: “At that time some laughed at us (...) they said that we were a bubble on social networks, that we were trolls, that trolls did not vote.

But then we took to the streets... Our country changed, no one can deny that, but now our job this Sunday is to guarantee that those changes are forever.”

All for a slogan, all for power.

It has taken us so long to get here… pic.twitter.com/IJDoG6E7NJ

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 1, 2024