El Salvador legislative and municipal elections - February 28, 2021

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Legislative and municipal elections will be held in El Salvador on February 28, 2021.

The unicameral Legislative Assembly has 84 seats elected in the fourteen departments, which have between 24 (San Salvador) and 3 seats each, serving three-year terms. Since 2015, deputies are elected by open-list proportional representation with panachage (locally called voto cruzado). Voters can vote directly for a party list (party flag), for several candidates on one list, or for as many candidates from different lists as there are seats to fill.

This year, the country’s 20 seats in the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) will also be elected, using the same electoral system. They seem to serve six-year terms, although it doesn’t matter since the Parlacen is pointless.

El Salvador has 262 municipalities. Voters only vote for a mayoral candidate with a party label, with the candidate with the most votes winning while seats on the municipal council are distributed proportionally.

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In 2019, Nayib Bukele – former mayor of San Salvador (2015-2018) – was elected promising radical transformations and ending the old political system. He benefited from widespread discontent with the two parties which had dominated politics since the end of the civil war in 1992 – the right-wing ARENA (in power from 1989 to 2009) and left-wing FMLN (in power from 2009 to 2019).

Neither party has much to show for their years in power. They left behind them a sorry trail of widespread corruption, backroom deals, arrogance, abuse of power, poverty, violence, failed security policies, broken promises and dashed expectations.

Three former presidents have been indicted for corruption: Francisco Flores (ARENA, 1999-2004), Antonio Saca (ARENA, 2004-2009) and Mauricio Funes (FMLN, 2009-2014). Flores, accused of embezzling $15 million in Taiwanese earthquake relief funds, died before facing trial. Saca is now serving a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty and confessing to embezzling $300 in presidential ‘secret funds’. Funes, the first left-wing president, fled the country and was granted asylum in Nicaragua in 2016. A year later, he was convicted in absentia of illicit enrichment, unable to explain $419,000 in expenses. Funes remains ‘in exile’ in Nicaragua and received Nicaraguan citizenship in 2019. He still faces four other arrest warrants including one for embezzling $350 million from the presidency’s secret slush fund.

The millennial president (39 years old) is remarkably popular, with approvals close to 90%. Adept at social media and with marketing background, he has a straightforward and informal tone on social media, with emojis, commentary and insults interspersed with family pictures with his wife and newborn daughter. He uses social media to make public announcements and dispatch orders to government officials.

Bukele wants quick, concrete results even if that means bypassing democratic procedures and the constitution. He has little patience for any obstacles placed in his way, and no tolerance for criticisms of his policies. That has made him remarkable popularity in a country disillusioned by ineffectual leaders – but has also made clear his authoritarianism and disregard for human rights and the rule of law.

Bukele has regularly attacked and insulted his political opponents – other parties, deputies, the judiciary, human rights activists, journalists, certain business leaders and even U.S. members of Congress – in lengthy public diatribes or sarcastic tweets.

This year he is aiming to consolidate his control by winning an absolute majority in the legislature with his party, Nuevas Ideas. He’s well on track to achieve a massive victory, in part because the opposition is astonishingly inept.


Over the next little while I will post a ton about Bukele, how terrible he is and then about all the parties and how terrible they all are. It's a lot. But for those who don't feel like reading that, here's my far less polished and far more hyperbolic/biased tl;dr presentation of Salvadoran parties.

Nuevas Ideas: Nayib Bukele's cult, whose ideas are not at all new. Their new ideas, in fact, are whatever Bukele has last tweeted or against whoever Bukele has last insulted on social media. Largely revolves around saying that everybody else are corrupt criminal traditional politicians who have ruined the country, and that Bukele is the saviour. Also, it's led by Bukele's cousin.

They are against corruption, but only if they're not the ones doing it. They also manage to be less transparent than everybody else, and turned the pandemic into a great opportunity to give contracts to friends and really sketchy companies. Like a Chinese toy company, a Spanish car parts company and a Florida ceramics company. Will win in an historic landslide because, well, everybody else does suck and Bukele is a really good snakeoil salesman.

GANA: Really corrupt opportunists who will literally ally with anyone who bribes them. Of course, they now support Bukele and would really like you to believe that they're still his party - he used their label to get elected in 2019. It was initially former president (convicted criminal) Tony Saca's clique, created with the blessing of then-president (convicted criminal/fugitive) Mauricio Funes and managed by Tony's sketchy cousin, a political fixer with links to drug trafficking. Their most prominent deputy is famous for hiring 11 relatives in the legislature and enriching himself by 3 million dollars.

ARENA: Traditional right-wing party since the 1980s, and now leading opposition party. Founded by crazed psychopathic murderer and death squad organizer Blowtorch Bob, uh, major Roberto d'Aubuisson. Later transformed into a more generic right-wing neoliberal party, essentially the party of, for and by El Salvador's traditional private sector oligarchic elite and implementing the sort of policies that those people love. No worries though, they still keep a really special place in their hearts for Blowtorch Bob. Like, they usually kick off their campaigns commemorating the massacre of tens of thousands of indigenous campesinos in 1932 the glorious crushing of the communist uprising.

Lost power in 2009 and has never regained the presidency, remaining largely discredited by their rather disastrous and very corrupt administrations. Regularly tries to convince people that they are a new ARENA, but without doing anything to prove that. They're now claiming to defend democracy against Bukele's authoritarianism while their party march still includes the phrase "El Salvador will be the grave where the reds finish". Also, 'the reds' are now their allies...

FMLN: The reds referred to above, the former leftist guerrilla in the civil war which became a political party with the 1992 peace agreement. Finally achieved power in 2009, and retained it by the skin of their teeth in 2014. Came in with very high expectations, and proceeded to sh!t all over them. Their first president, Funes, although he wasn't really 'theirs' (he was an outsider to the party), embezzled millions. Their second president, Sánchez Cerén, was really one of theirs (a former guerilla commander) and was a dud.

Now a morally bankrupt party which abandoned all it stood for, for their leaders to stuff their pockets and become rich quickly. Still pays lip service to leftist rhetoric, but have no real ideas. Absolutely crushed in 2018 and 2019, they will manage to be nearly eliminated this year. Is also claiming to defend democracy, in alliance with ARENA...

PCN: Old corrupt and opportunistic right-wing party. One of the oldest parties, and the dominant ruling party under the military-dominated regimes of 1961-1979. Has declined since, but has retained significant (oversized) power and influence as a 'hinge party' holding the balance of power in legislatures, allying with both ARENA and the FMLN. The PCN's ranks include a really charming bunch of crooks, old military types and people connected to drug traffickers. I guess a good example of the PCN's power is that El Salvador adopted the US dollar in 2000 because the PCN voted in favour in exchange for ARENA forgiving a PCN deputy who had shot and wounded a cop while drunk. The deputy in question is seeking reelection again, btw.

PDC: A pathetic shadow of its former self, the PDC is a much weaker opportunistic right-wing party which is seeking to stay relevant by behaving much like the PCN/GANA. Its leader is the guy who helped the military cover up the 1989 murder of the 6 Jesuits by the army. A real Christian democrat, no doubt.

CD: Nominally 'moderate centre-left social democratic' party which is useless and has very unstable leadership. Now supports Bukele, although I doubt he noticed them.

Vamos: New party pretending to be some vague political alternative, is actually run by a millionnaire businessman/evangelical pastor who is of course rather right-wing. Makes a point of being pro-life and opposed to whatever the hell 'dehumanized liberalism' is, but so is every other party in the country.

Nuestro Tiempo: Lame new hip centrist party with lots of young people, mostly founded and led by young-ish liberal ARENA dissidents, some of whom notably supported gay marriage and abortion rights. Not sure why somebody who supports gay rights would join a party founded by Hitler admirer Major Bob in the first place, but whatever.

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Nayib Bukele’s authoritarianism – 9F

The president and the legislature – dominated by the opposition – have almost constantly been at odds since 2019.

In early February 2020, Bukele demanded that deputies authorize a $109 million loan request for his security strategy and used his constitutional power to convene the legislature. He warned legislators of dire consequences if they didn’t obey, while he deployed the military to cordon off the Legislative Assembly and called on his supporters to gather at the entrance of the building. Deputies were intimidated by the police and the military and had their security detail temporarily taken away. On 9 February, in a choreographed and televised show of force, Bukele ordered soldiers to occupy the Legislative Assembly and entered the hemicycle by force. He sat in the chair of the legislature’s president and coldly said that it was now very clear who was in control of the situation. In front of a crowd of thousands of supporters, Bukele gave legislators one week to approve the loan request and threatened a popular insurrection and dissolution of the assembly if they did not.

The next day, the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court issued an injunction which told Bukele to cease and desist and blocked the illegitimate use of the police and military by the executive. The court ruled that the president’s actions put the separation of powers at risk. Bukele also suffered a fair amount of blowback from the international community, including the US, for the events of 9 February. El Faro argued that the events of 9 February were part of a marketing strategy – to distract public attention from other matters – that got out of hand.

In its final ruling in October 2020, the Supreme Court reiterated that the convening of the legislature by the cabinet was unconstitutional, that the president could not coerce any other branch of government and that the political instrumentalization of the police and military was ‘criminal’.

Nayib Bukele’s dystopian pandemic

Bukele adopted strict but often controversial restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has accepted no criticism or oversight and has repeatedly lashed out against those who have dared criticize him.

In March, before there were any confirmed cases in the country, he closed the borders and the schools. The legislature approved a state of emergency which allowed for temporary restrictions on mobility and assembly.

Returning travelers were forced to quarantine for 30 days in (packed) haphazard ‘containment centres’ which were criticized by the human rights ombudsman (PDDH) for ‘inhumane treatment’ and lacking proper health and testing protocols. In early April, a man died after being forcibly quarantined in a containment centre.

Following the confirmation of the first case on 18 March, the government decreed a strict nationwide lockdown, banning people from leaving their house (with exceptions) under penalty of being arrested and sent to a containment centre. A decree in April allowed the health ministry to enter homes and the police to confiscate vehicles of those who violate public health restrictions. The Supreme Court later ruled those provisions unconstitutional.

Bukele announced relief measures like a $300 subsidy for 1.5 million low-income households, and utility and cable/phone bills were frozen for three months for those directly affected by the pandemic. Those measures were popular, but in practice they were poorly executed and the list of beneficiaries incoherent. In late March, thousands of people gathered near government offices to claim their subsidy and many became frustrated. Refusing to take responsibility for his government’s mess-up, Bukele dubiously claimed that ‘agitators’ were paid by the opposition to make him look bad.

HRW accused the police of arbitrarily arresting and mistreating thousands of people for allegedly violating lockdown orders. Bukele’s statements on social media encouraged excessive use of force and the draconian enforcement of the government’s measures. The PDDH denounced over 900 cases of arbitrary detentions and cruel and degrading treatment against detainees.

The Supreme Court in late March ordered the release of three people arrested for buying food at a market and ruled that those detained in police stations be sent home, and in April it ruled that people could not be held in a containment centre solely for violating lockdown rules. However, Bukele repeatedly defied the court’s rulings and refused to comply.
 
In mid-April, after images showing people on the streets in the coastal town of La Libertad, Bukele arbitrarily ordered – via Twitter – a 48-hour ‘sanitary fence’ around the city, enforced by the army, which banned people from leaving their house for any reason.

In May, with daily cases rising, Bukele announced an even stricter lockdown – limiting travel between municipalities, restricting trips outside the house to twice a week and completely suspending all public transit/taxis. These new measures hurt the most vulnerable – low-income workers without a car, suddenly dependent on their employer providing them with private transportation.

In the first months of the pandemic, the government managed to obtain the support of the opposition in the legislature (particularly ARENA) for its pandemic policies. In early May, for example, ARENA gave its support to a quarantine law which legalized the (arbitrary) detention of those suspected of violating the lockdown in exchange for a $1 billion rescue package to help private businesses. However, relations between the two branches quickly worsened, as Bukele made clear that he intended to do as he wished.

In mid-May, when the legislature refused to extend the state of emergency – because the government had failed to transparently report its emergency spending – Bukele unilaterally extended the state of emergency by decree. The attorney general challenged the extension in court, and the Supreme Court granted an injunction suspending the executive decree. Days later, the Supreme Court suspended another decree through which Bukele again attempted to extend the state of emergency without the legislature’s consent.

This began a tug-of-war between the government and the legislative opposition over who should dictate the gradual lifting of restrictions and reopening of the economy. Bukele vowed to veto a law passed which would have allowed for a phased reopening of the economy and imposed limits on the government’s emergency powers. Instead, negotiating with some leading businessmen, he wanted a strict 15-day lockdown followed by a gradual reopening in early to mid-June.

At the end of May, negotiations between the executive and legislature to reach a consensus on new emergency legislation failed, with Bukele once again signaling his intent to veto a new law passed by the legislature to regulate the reopening of the economy.

On 8 June, the Supreme Court, in striking down two laws and several decrees, ruled that the two previous months of lockdown had essentially been done illegally. It found that the legislature didn’t adequately justify limitations on fundamental rights and criticized Bukele’s “preoccupying insistence” on ignoring his constitutional limitations. Despite the court giving them four days to reach agreement, the executive and legislative weren’t even able to agree on a meeting place, much less any kind of compromise solutions.

Unsurprisingly, unfazed by the court, Bukele unilaterally issued a decree regulating the reopening of the economy over five phases, beginning in mid-June. Because of rising case numbers, the second phase – which allowed restaurants and shopping centres to reopen and public transportation to restart – was delayed until late August. These decrees, as lawyers had warned, were also eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Bukele’s response to the pandemic has been extremely popular, with well over 80% approval. Others in Latin America praised his response as an example to follow. El Salvador currently has reported over 55,000 cases and about 1,600 deaths. Cases peaked in mid-August and declined thereafter but have been rising steadily again since early December. El Salvador has one of the lowest numbers of reported cases and deaths per capita in Latin America.

Research by the LSE has shown that the stringent lockdowns had a devastating impact on the poor’s livelihoods. Many stopped working, skipped meals, took loans from predatory lenders or even ended medical treatment for chronic illnesses.

Corruption pandemic
Amidst the pandemic, the government was authorized to bypass normal public procurement procedures to buy emergency medical supplies, provided that it presented monthly reports detailing its expenses. The government has spent more than $3 billion since March.

The government has failed to provide detailed expense reports to the legislature and suspended public access to information requests during the lockdown. HRW denounced that as a result, several people in quarantine facilities had not been provided with their COVID-19 test results.

A very large number of corruption cases related to pandemic spending and procurement have been revealed.

In May, the Court of Accounts reported that the government had given the $300 subsidy to 100,000 people under unknown criteria. The health ministry bought $344,000 in face masks from a company owned by pro-Bukele ex-ARENA deputy Gustavo Escalante and his family, which had never sold medical supplies before. 22% of those masks were later found be to be unusable.

In June, Bukele fired the head of the environmental fund (Fonaes) after it was revealed that his company had received a $250,000 government contract for face masks. Companies owned by his brother and sister-in-law had also received contracts from the agriculture ministry for food baskets.

A company owned by health minister Francisco Alabí’s cousins received a $225,000 contract from the health ministry for rubber boots. Alabí’s cousins also got $19,500 from the tourism ministry to rent a property converted into a containment centre. As if that wasn’t enough, Alabí also decided that a pandemic was the best time for him to spend more than $50,000 to remodel his office.

In July, Bukele appointed José Alejandro Zelaya as finance minister despite Zelaya’s ties to a company which received $750,000 contract from the health ministry for face shields.

Companies belonging to Christian Guevara, a legislative candidate for Nuevas Ideas, won over $1 million in eight contracts from the state during the pandemic, providing AC units to hospitals. Since Bukele’s election in 2019, his ad agency has also received over $500,000 from government contracts, a 122% increase from the previous administration. Guevara claims that he resigned from all his companies in 2019, although he remained listed as the companies’ founder until June 2020.

The health ministry also bought millions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies from overseas companies with no apparent experience, including $11 million in medical supplies from a Spanish car accessories company and $3 million in KN95 masks from a ceramics and porcelain company in Miami. The payments to the latter company resulted in its US bank account being frozen for a suspicious transaction report.

In November, the attorney general’s office (FGR) began an investigation into procurement irregularities during the pandemic, implicating several ministries. According to the FGR, two-thirds of the $31 million from the emergency fund used to purchase medical supplies are under investigation for possible irregularities. The government is already trying to obstruct the investigation: the police blocked prosecutors from carrying out search warrants at the health ministry.

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Superficial change

Bukele’s security policy, the territorial control plan, continues to be based on an ‘iron fist’ strategy – like that of previous governments for over ten years. Since 1999, the army has been called in to fight organized crime and the military’s presence – supposed to be temporary – has become quasi-permanent since 2009. Bukele increased the defence ministry’s budget by 51% and his plan has focused on law enforcement in prioritized municipalities. However, the government has also started to slowly tackle some of the underlying causes of gang violence – like social exclusion, scarce job opportunities and economic marginalization.

In April 2020, amidst the pandemic and following a sudden surge in homicides, the president ordered a mandatory prison lockdown, authorized the use of ‘lethal force’ by security forces and placed members of different gangs in shared cells. These extreme measures were denounced by HRW as inhumane.

Bukele’s greatest success has been a dramatic drop in homicides. 2020 closed as the least violent year since the end of the civil war, with the homicide rate falling to an historic low of 20 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 36 in 2019 and 50 in 2018. Since Bukele took office, El Salvador has also had over 35 days without a single recorded homicide. The government has credited their territorial control plan for this significant reduction in homicides, but the full story appears more complicated. A recent report by the International Crisis Group concluded that the correlation between the plan and the reduction in homicides is unclear. It may be due to gangs’ own decision to reduce violence or an informal understanding with the authorities.

Even though Bukele attacks ARENA and the FMLN for negotiating electoral support with gang leaders before the 2014 elections, he’s done the same – both as mayor of San Salvador and now as president. In September 2020, El Faro reported in great detail how the government had been negotiating with MS-13 since June 2019. The government and MS-13 secretly negotiated the reduction of homicides and support in the 2021 elections in exchange for prison privileges. Notably, the extreme measures in jails were quietly dropped in August.

In reaction to this article, Bukele announced during a televised press conference that a money laundering and tax evasion investigation had been opened against El Faro, a move which drew widespread condemnation from journalists and academics from around the world.

Bukele promised to create an international commission against corruption and impunity in El Salvador, like the famous CICIG in Guatemala. However, the CICIES created with the support of the OAS has limited powers. It cannot investigate cases on its own, and it may only provide technical advice to the FGR and certain other institutions if they request it. A constitutional amendment, which would take two legislative terms, would be required for the CICIES to have actual investigative powers, but the government has shown no interest in making these legal changes.

Perceived as dependent on the executive branch, the CICIES nevertheless surprised when it was the one to report irregularities in the health ministry’s pandemic contracts.

Like other Central American governments, Bukele supported the Trump administration’s immigration policies in the ‘northern triangle’ following the 2018 ‘migrant caravan’. El Salvador launched, with US support, a border patrol and signed an ‘asylum cooperative agreement’ (similar to ‘safe third country’ agreements, which require migrants to seek asylum in ‘safe’ countries they pass through) with the US. In exchange, Bukele (alongside the US ambassador) was able to announce a temporary extension of TPS status for Salvadorans in the US and claim it as a victory. In 2020, after a State Department praising El Salvador’s work on human rights, transparency and reducing ‘migrant caravans’, the Trump administration authorized aid for the country.

However, Bukele’s alliance with Trump may now backfire on him. In addition to several US congressmen denouncing Bukele’s attacks on press freedom and the rule of law, Bukele was snubbed by the Biden administration when he recently traveled to Washington D.C. and was unable to meet with any US government officials.

Breaking with previous governments, Bukele opposed amnesty laws (the 1993 amnesty law was ruled unconstitutional in 2016) and pledged to uphold historical memory of the civil war and fight against impunity.

Since then, his attitude has changed. He broke his promise to declassify military archives relating to the 1981 El Mozote massacre, instead siding with the army in refusing access to the files claiming that they are secret military files. In December 2020, shamelessly using the anniversary of the massacre as a campaign event, he claimed that the victims’ lawyer was “profiting from people” and “living off the case”.

Controversially, Bukele has said that the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords which ended the civil war were a ‘farse’, because they were negotiated between elites and brought no benefits to Salvadorans.

Media freedom has deteriorated under Bukele, as the president and his allies have repeatedly attacked or threatened independent or critical media and journalists. He has singled out online media outlets El Faro, Revista Factum and Gato Encerrado and right-leaning print newspapers La Prensa Gráfica and El Diario de Hoy, accusing them of lying and leading an orchestrated campaign against him. On the other hand, the government has launched a new state-owned newspaper, Diario El Salvador, and benefits from favourable coverage on most TV channels.

Bukele, Family & Friends

In forming his cabinet, Bukele has surrounded himself with friends, former classmates, and relatives. Most of his ministers are young like him and appear to be social media savvy.
 
But even above the cabinet, a lot of power has been concentrated in the Bukele family clan – the president and his three younger brothers: Karim, Yusef and Ibrajim. His brothers don’t have any official title, but they are said to wield significant power within the government as strategists, advisors, unofficial negotiators and recruiters. Karim, who was Nayib’s campaign manager in 2019, is the strategist and negotiator. In 2020, he lobbied the legislature to pass the $1 billion rescue package to help businesses and negotiated its distribution with the private sector. Yusef and Ibrajim, twin brothers, are advisors who have participated in business and trade negotiations and interviewed candidates for government positions.

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So this entry explains what I meant by the opposition being very, very stupid: they - the body with like a 2% approval - think the best way to deal with a guy with 90%+ approvals is to threaten to remove him from office. And their main cheerleader in this stupidity just happens to be the convicted Twitter political commentator chiming in from Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua.

The 2021 Campaign

Bukele’s goal is to win an absolute majority for Nuevas Ideas in the legislature this year and deal a massive blow to his political enemies, particularly ARENA and the FMLN. Bukele and his allies has branded the two old parties as a ‘pact of the corrupt’, ‘the same as always’ or ‘ARENAFRENTE’.

Since 2018, ARENA and the FMLN have often worked together in the legislature to maintain control of certain branches or state institutions – the judiciary, the court of accounts, the electoral court, the attorney general, the human rights ombudsman.

The two parties have been unable to pick themselves up after their 2019 defeats. Indeed, it often appears that they’re playing right into Bukele’s hands.

The campaign has been marked by violence. On January 31, two FMLN activists were assassinated in San Salvador. It is unclear if there was an exchange of fire, as Bukele has since suggested. The FGR has charged three suspected assailants, all of them working for the health ministry, including a member of the minister’s security detail.
 
In his initial Twitter response to the attack, Bukele insinuated that the FMLN had organized the attack for political gain. On the other hand, opposition politicians – from the FMLN, ARENA and others – blamed Bukele’s inflammatory rhetoric and some even directly accused the president of being the assassin.

On February 9, the first anniversary of ‘9F’, the opposition thought that the best way to commemorate that would be to try to remove the president with 90% approvals from office. One ARENA deputy presented an initiative to declare Bukele mentally unfit, following diagnosis from a medical commission. FMLN deputies signed a petition supporting Bukele’s removal from office. At first, it appeared as if there was at least some support for the ideas from both main opposition parties. Bukele wasted no time in describing this as a ‘parliamentary coup attempt’ to remove a democratically elected president.

Belatedly realizing their mistake, both ARENA and FMLN tried to backtrack and claim that they did not want to impeach Bukele. The president mocked the FMLN deputies for signing the petition, and then quickly backtracking. As if that wasn’t enough, corrupt former president Mauricio Funes – one of Bukele’s favourite targets – chimed on in Twitter urging the opposition parties to remove Bukele from office.

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So, who is the lesser evil in this? From that read it still seems like it is Bukele?

Of course there doesn't seem to be literally anyone who is even remotely good

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I'm now moving on to the individual profiles of all the parties. Beginning with Bukele's NI and the corrupt GANA

Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas, NI): Nayib Bukele’s political party, led by his cousin, Xavier Zablah Bukele. No cookies for guessing what the N in the party’s logo also stands for. NI was founded in 2017 following Bukele’s expulsion from the FMLN but was unable to obtain its registration to run in the 2018 or 2019 elections. As a result, Bukele was elected in 2019 under the label of GANA (see below).

Nuevas Ideas’ ideas are whatever Bukele has last tweeted, and their ideas are hardly new. Bukele began his political career with the left-wing FMLN and was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán (2012-2015) and later mayor of San Salvador (2015-2018) under the banners of that party. However, he quickly became a dissenting voice within the party, culminating in his expulsion in 2017. He has attacked both the right and the left, accusing them of being corrupt self-serving elites responsible for poverty and exclusion. He has often claimed that right and left, and partisan identities rooted in the civil war, are archaic and outdated. Nuevas Ideas’ leaders and candidates come from a variety of different political backgrounds: some, like Bukele and Vice President Félix Ulloa, were once members of the FMLN while others, like Walter Araujo, came from ARENA.

Bukele is often perceived by the public as a centrist. His policies and ideas, however, are more right-wing. His first foreign trip after his election was to Washington D.C., where he spoke to the Heritage Foundation. He has sung the praises of private enterprise, limited government and free markets, although he has also picked a fight with the private sector lobby (the National Association of Private Enterprise, ANEP) – usually a very close ally of ARENA – and has announced that he doesn’t recognize the ANEP’s president, Javier Simán (former ARENA presidential pre-candidate). He is also socially conservative, opposing both abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

NI’s campaign is centered heavily around the figure of Nayib Bukele (incessantly repeating ‘vote for the N of Nayib’) and defeating the corrupt system controlled by the mismos de siempre (the traditional parties). The line between party ads and official government ads are very much blurred. Their ads have often played on past corruption in both ARENA and the FMLN, and recently they’ve seized on the opposition’s “coup attempt” to remove Bukele from office.

Over 35% of NI’s legislative candidates worked in the government, and another 5% are government contractors. The favourite to be the next president of the Legislative Assembly is Bukele’s former private secretary Ernesto Castro (top candidate in San Salvador). Castro is a long-time associate and business partner of the president, and is married to Michelle Sol, the current housing minister and Bukele’s successor as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán (2015-2019).

NI’s mayoral candidate in San Salvador is former interior minister Mario Durán. Durán is another close associate and business partner of Bukele. As a FMLN councillor, director of municipal development and Bukele’s right-hand man in San Salvador, Durán was part of the team tasked with secretly negotiating with gangs. Durán is campaigning as Nayib Bukele’s anointed candidate – in the speech to launch his mayoral campaign, Durán mentioned Bukele 26 times but only talked about himself a mere three times. He promises to continue Bukele’s legacy as mayor.

Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (Grand Alliance for National Unity, GANA): An opportunistic and corrupt right-wing party originally founded by 12 ARENA dissident deputies in October 2009, close to former president Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca (2004-2009). In 2018, GANA adopted Bukele as its presidential candidate and now seeks to remain relevant by supporting Bukele and imitating NI.

Created by ARENA defectors in the legislature in the wake of the right’s historic defeat in 2009, GANA was backed by Saca (expelled from ARENA in December 2009) and privately supported by President Mauricio Funes. GANA allied with the FMLN in the legislature and, in the shadows, Saca and his clique became close allies of Funes (paranoid that the FMLN leadership was out to screw him).

The éminence grise behind GANA is the mysterious businessman and political fixer Herbert Saca, Tony Saca’s cousin. Herbert Saca owns a car import company and seldom appears in public, but he has been a major financier of electoral campaigns and was the political operator for both Tony Saca and Funes. He was the intermediary between Funes and GANA and is said to have managed alleged payments from the presidency to GANA deputies. His name has been linked to organized crime and drug trafficking and has been on US authorities’ radar since at least 2008, but he has never been formally accused of anything.

In 2018, as Nayib Bukele was looking for a party with which to run for president, he was adopted by GANA which opportunistically transformed itself in the image of the popular millennial: it changed its colour from orange to Bukele’s cyan/turquoise and adopted as its logo the swallow which Bukele was using. It was a winning calculation, as Bukele won the presidency under GANA’s label in a landslide in February 2019. Since then, GANA’s 10 deputies in the Legislative Assembly have been the main pro-government bloc in the legislature.

Herbert Saca appears to enjoy close ties to Bukele. In August 2019, Bukele and Saca attended a party hosted by the Orozco brothers, a business family which in the past has financed GANA and lent money to Bukele. The president has also appointed several people who were (or are) linked to Herbert Saca to his cabinet.

Bukele’s press secretary, Ernesto Sanabria, who once said he was friends with Herbert Saca, previously served as communications adviser to then-president Tony Saca (2004-2009) before joining Bukele’s entourage in 2015.

Gustavo Villatoro, director of customs under Saca was re-appointed to that same position in 2019 by Bukele. In August 2020, Villatoro was appointed Superintendent of the Financial System where he is helping Bukele fight corruption by… telling banks not to close the accounts of suspected or accused money launderers.

GANA’s current president is Parlacen deputy Nelson Guardado, briefly vice minister of public works under Bukele. One of the original founding members of GANA in 2009, Guardado was in the past a close ally and staunch defender of both Tony Saca and Mauricio Funes.

GANA’s current vice president and former leader is Guillermo Gallegos (also one of the founding members), who was president of the Legislative Assembly between 2017 and 2018. Gallegos has been implicated in several corruption scandals. Among other things, he is accused of hiring eleven relatives in the Legislative Assembly and unjustified enrichment by over $3 million. Two of Gallegos’ relatives are among GANA’s legislative candidates this year, with his brother-in-law in the second spot on the GANA list behind Gallegos in San Salvador.

Bukele now has his own party, but GANA hopes to remain an important element in Bukele’s future legislative majority. Their goal is to win 15 seats and be the key bloc in the Legislative Assembly to allow NI to have a simple majority (43 votes). But that depends on NI alone winning less than 43 seats, which appears to be unlikely. A more realistic goal might be for GANA to hold the votes for a qualified majority (56 votes), required to adopt the budget and elect the attorney general and magistrates of the Supreme Court, among others.

Although Bukele’s party is now NI, GANA still sells itself as Bukele’s party as well (or ‘the party of the swallow’, whatever that’s supposed to mean) and seems to be trying to deliberately mislead voters by imitating NI as much as possible – notably sharing the same colours.

GANA and NI are running in coalition in the five 3-seat departments – Cuscatlán, Cabañas, Chalatenango, La Unión and San Vicente. Two of the three candidates on coalition lists are from NI. GANA is also supporting Mario Durán, NI’s mayoral candidate in San Salvador.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yeeesh, sounds like awful news all around.

Fascinating writeup, as always.

[Hash]

Charming ARENA, defendors of democracy, and their new red friends.

Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA): The main right-wing party, founded in 1981 by ex-major Roberto d’Aubuisson, a crazed psychopathic murderer and death squad organizer. ARENA has since shifted into a more generic ‘anti-communist’ right-wing neoliberal party. Largely discredited by their rather disastrous two decades in power and widespread corruption, it has lost the last three presidential elections.

ARENA was formed in 1981 by private oligarchic economic elites, who feared their interests would be threatened by the reformist military junta (1979-1982), with the support of conservative factions of the military. The party’s founder was Major Roberto “Blowtorch Bob” d’Aubuisson – a former director of military intelligence (educated at the School of the Americas) – a pathological killer who openly advocated for mass murder. D’Aubuisson organized and financed death squads and ordered the assassination of several prominent figures, most infamously Mgr. Óscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, in 1980. According to the UN Truth Commission, the state, paramilitaries, and death squads were responsible for 85% of atrocities during the civil war. ARENA continues to deny that basic fact, and it has always supported impunity for war crimes.

D’Aubuisson was beyond the pale even for the Reagan administration, which supported his Christian democratic opponent in the 1984 election. ARENA gradually moderated its extremist image to become acceptable to US interests; d’Aubuisson stepped aside and the party professed its commitment to democracy (although only if they were to be in charge).
 
ARENA still keeps a very special place for their hearts for deranged psychos. D’Aubuisson is still hailed as the party’s founder. The party’s march includes the line “El Salvador will be the grave where the reds finish”, and ARENA traditionally launches its electoral campaigns in Izalco, to commemorate the brutal repression of the 1932 ‘communist’ uprising – and the massacre of 15,000-30,000 indigenous campesinos.

ARENA was in power for twenty years between 1989 and 2009 under the presidencies of Alfredo Cristiani, Armando Calderón Sol, Francisco Flores and Antonio Saca. ARENA is excessively close to private sector oligarchs, represented by the ANEP, and in power it pushed neoliberal policies – privatizations, structural adjustments, dollarization, free trade, privatization of pension funds – which favoured the interests of the wealthy and private businesses.

The party suffered an historic defeat in 2009, and again narrowly lost the 2014 presidential election to the FMLN. Perhaps because ARENA won the most seats in the last three legislative elections (2012, 2015 and 2018), the party refused to learn the lessons of its defeat(s) or admit responsibility for its past failures.

Deluded by their pyrrhic victory in 2018, ARENA was overly confident that it would regain power in 2019. Instead, its young candidate – multimillionaire businessman Carlos Calleja – was trounced by Bukele. The 2019 defeat has left ARENA deeply in debt, demoralized, divided and unsure how to move forward. At least with the FMLN, ARENA could fall back reflexively on its crude anti-communism. They’re now claiming to defend democracy against Bukele’s authoritarianism, even though ARENA defending democracy is pretty rich.

Party leader Gustavo López Davidson – an arms dealer – resigned in February 2020 to face embezzlement accusations related to an ‘arms swap’ deal. In August 2020, López Davidson was arrested alongside two former defence ministers (from FMLN administrations) for his involvement in the arms swap deal with the army.

Several arenero deputies, including Gustavo Escalante and Milena Mayorga (recently appointed Salvadoran ambassador to the US), quit the party and support Bukele.

Old ghosts keep haunting the party. Norman Quijano, former mayor of San Salvador and the ARENA’s 2014 presidential candidate, is accused of having met with MS-13 gang members during the 2014 presidential campaign, seeking their support in exchange for various benefits. In January 2020, the FGR asked the legislature to strip him of his immunity from prosecution, but it voted against doing so in May. The incumbent ARENA mayor of San Salvador, Ernesto Muyshondt, is also accused of having negotiated with gang leaders on at least two occasions and giving them $69,000.

Quijano is running for the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) this year, seeking to retain his parliamentary immunity elsewhere. The Parlacen has become a refuge for corrupt, discredited politicians like former Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales.

ARENA is likely to get its worst result ever this year. The party’s best hope is Ernesto Muyshondt, the mayor of San Salvador who is facing an uphill reelection battle. Muyshondt has distanced himself from the party’s leadership, maintained good relations with Bukele and repeatedly criticized the party’s leadership. Most recently, he criticized the legislature’s attempts to remove Bukele from office on the first anniversary of 9F. In his campaign, he has replaced the party’s traditional colours with orange.

Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN): The main (nominally) left-wing party, the FMLN was founded in 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerrilla groups and was the main guerrilla force during the civil war. It became a political party following the end of the conflict in 1992.

The FMLN did not win the presidency until 2009, but its support gradually increased – it won the most seats in the legislature in 2000 and won more votes than ARENA in the 2003 legislative elections. The party also controlled the capital city between 1997 and 2009. When the FMLN won its first presidential election in 2009, it did so thanks to a moderate outsider, Mauricio Funes (a former journalist), whose promise of change and clean government raised expectations. His record in power was, at best, disappointing.

The FMLN retained power in 2014 with Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander during the civil war. Whereas Funes was an outsider whose relations with the FMLN was characterized by mutual distrust (Funes famously thought that his party was spying on him), Sánchez Cerén was an old party cadre who gave bureaucratic jobs and sweet business deals to party allies. Under Sánchez Cerén’s administration, homicide rates surged to over 100 in 2015 following the end of the controversial 2012-2013 gang truce. The government ramped up a new hardline strategy which showed no concern for human rights.

In its ten years in power, the FMLN became a morally bankrupt party which abandoned its principles, betrayed what it stood for and did exactly what it had accused the right of doing for years.

Besides Funes, several efemelenista leaders enriched themselves during their years in power. Sigfrido Reyes, the first FMLN president of the Legislative Assembly (2011-2015), was charged with money laundering, embezzlement and fraud in January 2020. Now a fugitive, he claims to be a victim of political persecution.

Alba Petróleos, launched in 2006 as a joint venture between FMLN-run municipalities and the Venezuelan state oil company PdVSA, became a conglomerate with a large network of subsidiaries financed by the sale of subsidized Venezuelan oil. Alba Petróleos turned into a multi-million-dollar business for a handful of companies, including offshore companies in Panama, linked to FMLN politicians – led by José Luis Merino, a senior FMLN leader and former vice minister for foreign investment (2016-2019). By 2015, the consortium was reporting over $1 billion in revenues, a massive growth within just a decade. Alba Petróleos lost influence as Venezuelans funds dried up after 2015, and today it is nearly bankrupt.

The US imposed economic sanctions on Alba Petróleos in 2019, and the FGR is investigating the consortium for money laundering. The company is suspected of embezzling millions of dollars through illegal contracts or bad loans to shell companies run by Merino and his brother. An FMLN internal audit reported that Alba Petróleos had lost track of at least $600 million, which disappeared through bad loans. Inverval, a company which got money from Alba and which is among those investigated by the FGR, loaned $1.9 million to Nayib Bukele in 2013. Inverval also loaned money to Bukele’s family’s company to invest in Starlight, owner of the TVX television station.

Merino and his brother are being investigated by the DEA and FBI, and the FGR has had an open investigation against Merino for arms trafficking with the FARC since 2008. Merino was also close friends with a fugitive Salvadoran businessman whose planes were seized in the US for alleged ties to drug trafficking.

In 2018, hurt by corruption scandals and the government’s unpopularity, the FMLN lost 8 seats in the legislative elections and got its worst result since 1994, its first election. The 2019 election was even more catastrophic. Hugo Martínez, the FMLN’s presidential candidate, won only 14.4%. The two successive debacles have left the party in ruins and deeply divided. The 2019 election forced the resignation of the leadership, which had been in place for 15 years.

The FMLN’s current secretary general, elected in 2019, is former vice president (2014-2019) Óscar Ortiz. Ortiz previously had the reputation of being a reformist, distant from the party leadership after losing leadership battles in 2003 and 2004. However, he also comes with his own baggage. In 2016, El Faro revealed that Ortiz had been the business partner of José Adán Salazar Umaña “Chepe Diablo”, a respected businessman accused of being leader of the Texis Cartel. Ortiz had invested in a real estate development with “Chepe Diablo”, partaking in suspicious land transactions indicative of money laundering activities. In 2014, the US government added “Chepe Diablo” to the narcotics kingpin list, but he was removed in 2017. “Chepe Diablo” was arrested in El Salvador in 2017 and is accused of money laundering.

As if 2018 and 2019 weren’t bad enough, the FMLN is likely to collapse to new lows this year.

[Hash]

And this is the last post about the parties, and all that I wrote about this so far.

Partido de Concertación Nacional (National Concertation Party, PCN): An old opportunistic conservative party created in 1961 as the National Conciliation Party, it was the dominant party during the 1960s and 1970s. It is a partido bisagra or ‘hinge party’, often powerful in legislative coalitions as the kingmaker.

The PCN was created in 1961, closely associated to the military. Between 1961 and 1979, the PCN was the ruling party under the civic-military regime. It served as the vehicle for the election of four military officers to the presidency in elections often marred by fraud – colonel Julio Adalberto Rivera (1962-1967), general Fidel Sánchez Hernández (1967-1972), colonel Arturo Armando Molina (1972-1977) and general Carlos Humberto Romero (1977-1979).

The PCN protected the power of the officer corps and preserved, for some time, the social status quo domestic stability required for economic growth within the elite-dominated system. The PCN governments undertook limited and controlled reform to placate non-elite sectors but created a large security apparatus to control the rural population and brutally repressed left-wing opposition groups.

The Nationalist Democratic Organization (ORDEN), created in the 1960s to control the peasant population and gather intelligence for the military, became a counterinsurgent paramilitary and a precursor of the death squads. It also helped the PCN win the rigged elections in the 1970s through voter intimidation.

Amidst a major rise in political violence and state repression, Romero was overthrown by young reformist officers in October 1979. Unlike ORDEN, the new junta did not dissolve the PCN, but the party was left to fend for itself without military backing and facing stronger right-wing competition from ARENA. Although the PCN did respectably well in 1982 and 1984, the party thereafter declined to roughly 8-10% in legislative elections.

Since the 1990s, the PCN has held between 6 and 16 seats in the legislature. In 2018, it won 9 seats. With no single party ever winning a simple majority, the PCN has always been a key player in legislative combinations and it has achieved significant influence by allying with both ARENA and the FMLN (and GANA). The PCN has held the presidency of the Legislative Assembly several times since 2000 – from 2000 to 2001, from 2002 to 2011 and again since November 2019.

The PCN’s relationship with ARENA has had ups and downs since the 1990s. They have often been allies, particularly during arenero presidencies in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the PCN voted in favour of the 1993 amnesty law, dollarization, and free trade with the US. In 2000, the PCN supported dollarization and, in return, ARENA forgave PCN deputy Francisco Merino (former vice president and president of the Court of Accounts), who had shot and wounded a police officer while inebriated. Merino wasn’t stripped of his parliamentary immunity (he remains in office today), and El Salvador adopted the US dollar.

On other occasions, the PCN allied with the leftist FMLN instead to assert its power and influence, notably in the early 2000s. Under the two FMLN administrations, the PCN’s relation with the governing party again had its ups and downs. GANA’s emergence weakened the PCN in its traditional role, although it did ally with the FMLN in the legislature on certain occasions. In 2014, the PCN supported Tony Saca’s presidential candidacy while in 2019 it was part of Carlos Calleja’s ARENA-led coalition.

After ARENA’s victory in the 2018 legislative elections, an ARENA-PCN alliance regained control of the legislature and marginalized the FMLN and GANA. Thanks to this deal, the PCN’s Mario Ponce has been president of the Legislative Assembly since November 2019. After initially being on somewhat good terms, Ponce and Bukele’s relations quickly deteriorated after 9F.

The PCN’s ranks include several deputies accused of corruption, illicit enrichment, inappropriate behaviour and even drug trafficking. PCN deputy colonel José Antonio Almendáriz was the last commander of the Atlacatl Battalion, responsible for some of the worst war crimes during the civil war. Almandáriz is accused of being responsible for the murder of a Spanish doctor in 1990, and was sanctioned by the US State Department in 2020. PCN deputy Reynaldo Cardoza has alleged ties to the Texis Cartel.

Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democratic Party, PDC): Now a pathetic shadow of its former self, the PDC was founded in 1960. Today, it is a marginal centre-right party which is often a partido bisagra or ‘hinge party’ like the PCN.

The PDC was founded by middle-class professionals in 1960, excluded from meaningful political participation and worried by extremism on the left and right. The PDC was the leading opponent of the civic-military regime and supported reforms, which the right saw as being dangerously leftist. It proved tenacious in the face of right-wing repression and exclusion from power. The PDC participated in the second and third revolutionary military juntas between 1980 and 1982. The PDC in its glory days could be described as centre-left, however with the defection or assassination of its more progressive members, it moved to the right in the 1980s.

The most prominent leader of the PDC was José Napoleón Duarte who was mayor of San Salvador (1964-1970), opposition candidate in the rigged 1972 election, member of the third junta and finally president (1984-1989). In the 1984 election, Duarte – seen as the more palatable democratic and reformist candidate – was backed by the United States against d’Aubuisson.

Duarte supported peace negotiations with the FMLN, but the peace talks got bogged down and stalled. Duarte’s ineffective leadership, the failure of peace talks, corruption allegations, the ravaged economy and internal divisions badly weakened the PDC, and it was badly defeated by ARENA in the 1988 legislative and 1989 presidential elections.

The PDC never recovered, and its support gradually declined significantly. It held 18 seats in 1994 but fell to 5-6 seats between 2000 and 2009. In 2012 and 2015, the PDC won only one seat and in 2018 it won three seats. Without the PCN’s level of influence or importance, the PDC has also been a partido bisagra or ‘hinge party’. Following the PCN, it supported Tony Saca in 2014 and Carlos Calleja in 2019.

The PDC’s leader and most prominent deputy is Rodolfo Parker, who is also one of Bukele’s favourite punching-bags. Parker is a wealthy lawyer and was member of a special commission set up by President Cristiani to investigate the 1989 murder of six Jesuits and two other people by the army. As legal adviser to the military, Parker, according to the Truth Commission, “altered statements in order to conceal the responsibility of senior officers for the murder” and “deleted the references to some officers”.

Cambio Democrático (Democratic Change, CD): A small moderate centre-left party, the CD is considered to be the successor party to various minor centre-left/moderate social democratic parties founded in the 1990s. The CD was first founded in 2005 by members of some of these old parties and FMLN dissidents. Most of its founding members have since left the party, and it has seen a succession of politicians come in and out. CD allied with Funes in 2009, but the little party was quickly abandoned and forgotten in favour of GANA.

In 2011, an evangelical right-winger and former PCN presidential candidate became party leader. The party’s only deputy between 2012 and 2015, and until recently one of its main candidates for 2021, was later accused of illicit enrichment, unable to explain how he increased his wealth by $300,000. The courts didn’t believe his story that he got part of it from an accountant who sold orange juice and toys. In 2018, the CD won one seat.

CD was the first party Nayib Bukele turned to in 2018 to run for president. However, the TSE controversially de-registered CD for not meeting the registration thresholds in the 2015 elections… een though it did meet them in 2018. The party has since managed to regain its registration in 2020. The party supports Bukele. Although it is running independent lists in 10 departments, it supports Mario Durán in San Salvador and is running in coalition with NI for the Parlacen.

Vamos: Vamos is a new party registered in 2017, claiming to be a new political alternative. Although its ideological principles are deliberately vague, it is a conservative party – it strongly opposes abortion and its principles include the rejection of communism, totalitarianism and dehumanized liberalism.

The party’s leader is Josué Alvarado, a millionaire businessman who immigrated to the United States and founded Rio Grande Foods in Maryland. Alvarado and many of his relatives are evangelical pastors – although religious ministers of any cult cannot be affiliated to political parties. Alvarado is the founder of Fraternidad Cristiana Internacional, an association of evangelical churches, while his wife and many other founding members of Vamos are also pastors.

Josué Alvarado was Vamos' presidential candidate in 2019, and he finished in last place with 0.77% of the vote.

Nuestro Tiempo (Our Time): Finally registered in 2019, Nuestro Tiempo is a ‘humanist centrist’ party founded primarily by young ARENA dissidents. The party’s top candidate in San Salvador is former ARENA deputy Johnny Wright, its leader is former ARENA deputy Juan Valiente and its second candidate in San Salvador is a former member of ARENA’s youth wing.

Wright, Valiente and other young areneros left the party in 2017. They had been critical of the party’s rigid and opaque conservative leadership, the lack of transparency in decision-making and some had publicly supported progressive causes like same-sex marriage and decriminalization of abortion.

The party has a vague platform focused on opposition to corruption and presenting itself as an independent party of honest, well-educated, and competent citizens.

[sguberman]

what's the party we should while vomiting and crying root for?

[Hash]

So, who is the lesser evil in this? From that read it still seems like it is Bukele?

what's the party we should while vomiting and crying root for?

It's certainly hard to disagree with Bukele when he criticizes ARENA/FMLN administrations of the past twenty years or points out the depths of corruption in these parties. However I really doubt he's the lesser evil: his rhetoric of change is very hollow, and as I pointed out, in actual terms the change he's offering from past governments is very superficial.

His 'opposition to corruption' is just posturing and political rhetoric - his government has in just a short period of time proven to be just as corrupt as the others. They took advantage of the pandemic and a temporary relaxation of normal public procurement rules to run wild and distribute overpriced contracts to friends and their sketchy companies. They have been very opaque and have put up big obstacles to transparency, including even temporarily shutting down access to information requests 'because of the pandemic' (how convenient). Whenever questioned or challenged by anyone, including prosecutors, about corruption the government's reaction has been to disqualify critics, use the police to physically hinder access to investigators (as happened in November when the police temporarily blocked access to prosecutors carrying out a search warrant at the health ministry) or play the familiar circus of crying out 'political persecution by [insert your own enemy here]'.

More worrying is Bukele's authoritarianism and blatant disregard for basic constitutional norms, rule of law and democratic principles. He wants to do things his way, regardless of whether or not that's actually legal, and he gets angry whenever someone tries to stop him. He's already proven that he could do an autogolpe if he wanted to - although thankfully it seems that the diplomatic reaction to that was so negative (even the Trump-era US ambassador wasn't particularly pleased about that 9F it seems) that it may have scared Bukele a bit. He's already repeatedly chosen to ignore court orders/injunctions and lashed out at any critics, like any good authoritarian strongman. He and his goons have gone against the independent media and have threatened freedom of the press.

Thankfully, so far, Bukele has been limited by the fact that a lot of other institutions are not (yet) under his control: the Supreme Court, the attorney general, the human rights ombudsman. Granted, none of these institutions are particularly outstanding examples of transparency/accountability either (especially not the attorney general's office), and they were put there thanks to ARENA-FMLN deals. But it is worrying to imagine what could happen to those institutions if Bukele can get his hands on them. And he will: if Nuevas Ideas or Nuevas Ideas+GANA win 56 seats, they will be able to appoint those officeholders without asking anyone else. Given how Bukele surrounds himself with family and friends who kowtow to his orders, it's worrying to imagine how subservient courts and prosecutors will allow him to do whatever he wants until 2024.

So what we should cheer for is to hope Nuevas Ideas and GANA win as a few seats as possible. However at the same time, I doubt anybody will really be shedding any tears if ARENA and even the FMLN go under...

Maybe if you're left-leaning and anti-Bukele, you could reluctantly support the FMLN in spite of their record, just in the hopes that they can save enough seats to hypothetically provide some challenge to Bukele. But they're really going to get trounced.

[Hash]

Here are recent polls that show just how Nuevas Ideas will win an historic landslide:

UCA - probably the highest quality poll from a respected and trusted source

Nuevas Ideas 68.8%
ARENA 5.3%
FMLN 3.7%
GANA 3.4%
PCN 1.6%
PDC 1%
Vamos 0.4%
Nuestro Tiempo 0.4%
CD 0.3%
Don't know/didn't say 14.9%

They don't have a nationwide seat projection but they had subsamples in the largest departments with seat projections there:
San Salvador (24): NI 16 seats, FMLN 2, ARENA 2, GANA 1, PDC 1, Vamos 1, Nuestro Tiempo 1
La Libertad (10): NI 7, GANA 1, ARENA 1, FMLN 1
Santa Ana (7): NI 5, GANA 1, ARENA 1
San Miguel (6): NI 3, GANA 1, FMLN 1, PDC 1

UFG

Nuevas Ideas 64.7%
ARENA 7.1%
GANA 3.1%
Independents 2.5%
FMLN 2.2%
PCN 1.3%
PDC 0.6%
Vamos 0.6%
Nuestro Tiempo 0.4%
Undecided/voto cruzado/invalid/won't vote 17%

Over 80% say they could vote for Nuevas Ideas, while over 70-80% say they wouldn't vote for any of the other parties (except GANA, 66% wouldn't vote for them).

Deputies get an average grade of 3.8/10 while Bukele gets a 8.87/10.

CIPSECA-PUCA - can't speak to the quality of this, especially as it has been publicized mostly by Bukele and the pro-Bukele online media

Nuevas Ideas 68% - 62 seats
ARENA 7% - 10 seats
GANA 6% - 8 seats
FMLN 2% - 2 seats
Nuestro Tiempo 0.5% - 1 seat
PDC 0.4% - 1 seat
PCN 0.3%
Vamos 0.3%
CD 0.1%
Independents 0.1%

There's another poll that has Nuevas Ideas at only 43.5% but has the FMLN unusually high (15.5%) and ARENA lower than usual (3%) so it seems to be an outlier.

[Bacon King]

Amazing thread hash, following with great interest!

[CumbrianLefty]

Here are recent polls that show just how Nuevas Ideas will win an historic landslide:

UCA - probably the highest quality poll from a respected and trusted source

Nuevas Ideas 68.8%
ARENA 5.3%
FMLN 3.7%
GANA 3.4%
PCN 1.6%
PDC 1%
Vamos 0.4%
Nuestro Tiempo 0.4%
CD 0.3%
Don't know/didn't say 14.9%

They don't have a nationwide seat projection but they had subsamples in the largest departments with seat projections there:
San Salvador (24): NI 16 seats, FMLN 2, ARENA 2, GANA 1, PDC 1, Vamos 1, Nuestro Tiempo 1
La Libertad (10): NI 7, GANA 1, ARENA 1, FMLN 1
Santa Ana (7): NI 5, GANA 1, ARENA 1
San Miguel (6): NI 3, GANA 1, FMLN 1, PDC 1

UFG

Nuevas Ideas 64.7%
ARENA 7.1%
GANA 3.1%
Independents 2.5%
FMLN 2.2%
PCN 1.3%
PDC 0.6%
Vamos 0.6%
Nuestro Tiempo 0.4%
Undecided/voto cruzado/invalid/won't vote 17%

Over 80% say they could vote for Nuevas Ideas, while over 70-80% say they wouldn't vote for any of the other parties (except GANA, 66% wouldn't vote for them).

Deputies get an average grade of 3.8/10 while Bukele gets a 8.87/10.

Blimmin 'eck

[Antonio the Sixth]

Oooooh boy. Yeah. That's what you call a landslide.

[Former President tack50]

I am assuming there are no thresholds or anything of the sort right? Just pure PR?

[Flyersfan232]

Is  Nayib Bukele a right wing populist?

[afleitch]

Well at least we get a few years of another right-wing autocrat consolidating his power. Don't get pregnant.

[Hash]

I am assuming there are no thresholds or anything of the sort right? Just pure PR?

Yes, it's pure open-list proportional representation (Hare quota, largest remainders) in each department. Seats are later distributed to individuals based on the preferential votes.

[Hash]

Here are the results of the last two elections - 2018 and 2019.

2018 Legislative and municipal elections

ARENA 41.72% - 37 seats (+5) plus
ARENA-PCN 1.69%
FMLN 24.54% - 23 seats (-8) plus
FMLN-CD 1.15%
FMLN-CD-PSD 0.59%
FMLN-PSD 0.5%
GANA 11.45% - 10 seats (-1)
PCN 10.87% - 9 seats (+3)
PDC 3.11% - 3 seats (+2) plus
PDC-PCN 1.1%
FPS 0.94%
CD 0.94% - 1 seat (+1)
PSD 0.73%
Independent 0.68% - 1 seat (+1)



The convoluted electoral system with panachage and the different coalitions in the departments makes the reporting of these results very confusing - I'm not sure I entirely understand it myself. ARENA-PCN ran in coalition in Morazán and San Vicente; the FMLN had coalition lists with smaller parties in Santa Ana, La Libertad and Ahuachapán while the PDC ran in coalition with the PCN in San Miguel.

To my knowledge, the votes reported as 'ARENA-PCN' or other multiparty coalitions only refer to those ballots where the voter marked the 'flags' of the coalition (a vote for all candidates on the list). Whenever the voter just voted for individual candidates on one or more list, that vote (or fraction of a vote, if the vote is split between candidates) is just reported for the party of the candidate rather than the whole coalition. It's confusing.

The national numbers for the municipal elections might be clearer as that electoral system is very much straightforward: ARENA won 41.8%, FMLN 29.2%, GANA 12.6%, PCN 10.5% and the PDC 4.1%.

Regardless of the details, ARENA was the main winner - although largely by virtue of the FMLN's defeat rather than anything else. While ARENA did gain 5 extra seats and win its highest percentage of the vote in a legislative election since 1994, because of lower turnout (45.7%, down 2.5% from 2015) and a large number of invalid and blank votes (10.4%), ARENA only won less than 1,000 more votes than in 2015. Something of a pyrrhic victory, as time would tell.

What is clear however is that the FMLN suffered a massive defeat. It won just over 26% of the vote if you include the coalition list votes and just 23 seats - its lowest result since 1994, when the ex-guerrilla won 21.4% and 21 seats in its first ever election. In 2015, the FMLN had won over 37% of the vote and 31 seats.

The two traditional hinge parties, the PCN and PDC, both increased their seat count. The first independent deputy, Leonardo Bonilla, was elected in San Salvador.

Without Bukele, the FMLN was trounced in the San Salvador mayoral race, with ARENA candidate Ernesto 'Neto' Muyshondt winning 61.3% against just 27.6% for the FMLN -- the party's worst result of all time. The FMLN suffered major loses in the San Salvador metro area as well: ARENA gained Soyapango, Ciudad Delgado and Cuscatancingo. The FMLN retained San Miguel and Zacatecoluca, while the PCN gained Cojutepeque from ARENA.

2019 Presidential election

Nayib Bukele (GANA) 53.1%
Carlos Calleja (ARENA-PCN-PDC-DS) 31.72%
Hugo Martínez (FMLN) 14.41%
Josué Alvarado (Vamos) 0.77%



Bukele won by over 20 points. He won 1.43 million votes, and won every single department. He also placed first in 196 municipalities, including all 14 departmental capitals.

Carlos Calleja (ARENA and allies) was the young candidate of the old conservative elite. 42 at the time of the election, he is vice president (and heir) of the Grupo Calleja, which owns Súper Selectos, the largest supermarket chain in the country; he had no prior political experience and only joined the party in 2013 but his family was among the traditional big business donors of ARENA. Calleja unsuccessfully tried to market himself as the face of a 'new ARENA' without any political baggage. He won 857,000 votes, less than the 886,000 votes which ARENA had won a year prior.

Hugo Martínez, the former foreign minister (2009-2013, 2014-2018), had won the FMLN's nomination in a low-turnout primary following the party's rout in the 2018 legislative elections, with the backing of the party's 'bases' unhappy with the leadership after the defeat. The hapless candidate desperately tried to downplay the party's unpopularity and failures, even criticizing his party in some instances. All that to no avail: Martínez's result was a total catastrophe, even compared to the previous year's disaster: he won only 389,200 votes, even less than the 521,200 votes the FMLN had won in 2018. And compared to the previous first round presidential ballot in 2014 - the FMLN lost nearly one million votes!

Turnout was quite low: 51.8%, compared to 55% in the first round in 2014 and over 60% in the 2014 runoff. This was the lowest turnout in a presidential election since 1999 when turnout had been just below 40%.

Nayib Bukele's best department (except for the irrelevant expat vote) was San Salvador where he won 58.3%, closely followed by La Paz (58%). His lowest result was in the poor rural northeastern department of Morazán where he won 39%. Bukele won 51.3% in the city of San Salvador, but did extremely well in the poorer peripheries of the metropolitan area - 64% in Soyapango, 59% in Mejicanos, 63.5% in Apopa, 63.9% in Ilopango, 59.2% in Ciudad Delgado and 64.6% in Cuscatancingo.

If you're curious, there's a map of the results by municipality here: https://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/nacional/estos-son-los-municipios-donde-gana-derroto-a-arena-y-al-fmln/566393/2019/.

[Velasco]

Amazing account so far  (still reading).

 My impression (rather superficial) is that Mr. Bukele must be the Ultimate Populist (master in public relations and social networks) and El Salvador looks like the perfect breeding ground for people like him. If the allegations made by El Faro are true, the implications of a collusion between Bukele and the Mara Salvatrucha look terrible

[Hash]

The election is tomorrow, and it's unlikely that any party besides Nuevas Ideas is particularly looking forward to the results. The main question is probably whether or not NI can win a simple majority (43 seats) or a qualified majority (56 seats) on its own -- if the polls are right, the former is very likely and the latter is a very real possibility. Outside of the legislative election, the main mayoral race is San Salvador, where ARENA incumbent Ernesto Muyshondt is - despite being the most popular opposition politician - probably going to lose to NI candidate Mario Durán.

El Faro has short profiles on all 84 NI/NI-GANA candidates for deputies: https://especial.elfaro.net/los-84-candidatos-de-bukele.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

El Faro’s projection is giving Bukele just what he needs to get 56 votes; if he gets less than that he can always count on however many li’l dudes GANA has. https://elfaro.net/es/202103/el_salvador/25304/Bukele-gana-la-Asamblea-Legislativa.htm

[njwes]

I'm sure there's a thread (probably several actually) somewhere deep in International General Discussion, and I'd be pleased to read through one of you think this has been sufficiently covered, but are there any Latin American counties where the party system is organized by ideological and philosophical beliefs, or even just profound differences in tradition and worldview? As opposed to the situation atm where the political party systems seem organized to an often comical degree by clientelism, patronage, and rent-seeming behavior?

(I know that this isn't a perfect dichotomy and that the difference between deeply-held ideology and pure, rapacious personal self-interest can be extremely tenuous even in the most established liberal democracies, but I think you know what I mean.)

If you could point to a country that'd be interesting, or even just some prominent parties, but I'm thinking parties that have actually continued to be centered on ideology* after an election or two, and not quickly transformed into the client-patron* clientelistic* type. I remember reading a while back about some of the evangelical parties in Latin America maybe fitting this mold--including the one in Colombia if I'm remembering correctly--but I haven't kept up with

*Apologies for these terms, I know they're inexact, I'm just trying to be impressionistic about it lol

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I'm sure there's a thread (probably several actually) somewhere deep in International General Discussion, and I'd be pleased to read through one of you think this has been sufficiently covered, but are there any Latin American counties where the party system is organized by ideological and philosophical beliefs, or even just profound differences in tradition and worldview? As opposed to the situation atm where the political party systems seem organized to an often comical degree by clientelism, patronage, and rent-seeming behavior?

(I know that this isn't a perfect dichotomy and that the difference between deeply-held ideology and pure, rapacious personal self-interest can be extremely tenuous even in the most established liberal democracies, but I think you know what I mean.)

If you could point to a country that'd be interesting, or even just some prominent parties, but I'm thinking parties that have actually continued to be centered on ideology* after an election or two, and not quickly transformed into the client-patron* clientelistic* type. I remember reading a while back about some of the evangelical parties in Latin America maybe fitting this mold--including the one in Colombia if I'm remembering correctly--but I haven't kept up with

*Apologies for these terms, I know they're inexact, I'm just trying to be impressionistic about it lol

What do you define as client-patron vs ideological? There are many ideological parties and currents that are centered on one person - MAS, for example - but still exist beyond them and support a general political project rather than solely that person’s interests. You can have a strong, popular leader without being clientelist.

As for systems, I think you’re always going to have some parties that are like that, albeit small ones. If you want countries where those are more the exception than the rule (or where the political system is dominated by parties more than personalities, to the extent that any political scene isn’t dominated. H personality) I guess Chile and Uruguay are always safe choices for relatively nice guy FF political scenes, generally speaking, but there are lots of countries where politics falls more along a standard left-right line, even if the parties themselves shift and change. Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil.