The 2019 presidential elections in El Salvador were won by Nayib Bukele with 53.1% of the votes in the first round. The new president was a 37-year-old businessman, his advertising agency spent twelve years managing the communication and propaganda of the FMLN and was mayor of that party, from 2012 to 2015 in Nuevo Cuscatlán and from 2015 to 2018 in San Salvador. The young man who presented himself as a radical left politician, at the end of the mandate of the mayor of the capital, drove his personal political project to the right and outside the FMLN.

Although Buel rejects ideological labels, we can look at populist social conservatism. The project focuses on two axes, on the one hand the diffuse fight against the establishment and, on the other, the more specific fight against crime and corruption. In addition, it is presented as a business friendly, anti-abortion and in favour of closer economic relations with the United States. However, Buel has emptied in his vote mainly the centre-left FMLN party, so that, in the face of this elector, he still retains some element of the sovereign left tradition, showing a firm attitude against the military interventions and his willingness to place above all the national interest of El Salvador.

Buel attracts many votes for his charisma, but the president’s priority is security in a country as dangerous as El Salvador. Furthermore, as some juvenile and authoritarian authorities from other developing countries, such as Mikhail Saakashvili at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Georgia, Buel aims to break the inertia of the country and create an effective, modern and functional state to give certainty to the citizens. But authoritarian leaderships to break these inertias are common. Since Buhete is president, the crime rate has fallen a great deal, but it has violated human rights and the rule of law, for example, by entering the military in Parliament.

Voters have not punished Bukele for her authoritarian positions, because they somehow understand that profound changes require authoritarian attitudes, which will be forgiven if the results are good. Voters in more and more countries are focusing on results in policy assessment. This reinforces governments and leaders before legislative powers.

It cannot be denied that Buel has fought inertia and achieved good results in the fight against criminal groups, in the action of the administration and with measures to deal with the crisis created by COVID-19, including the speech The Rebuke to the Rich. All of them received their prize in the parliamentary elections on 28 February 2021. After the 1992 peace agreements, for the first time a party will have an absolute majority in Parliament. New Ideas, the Bukele party, has won 56 of the 89 seats, to which, if we add the five extracted by its ally, form a two-thirds majority.

Buel has the largest concentration of power a president of El Salvador has had long ago. It remains to be seen whether the authoritarian attitude multiplies and builds an authoritarian system. Because the 2024 presidential elections could not be presented constitutionally and with their power and prestige at the moment it becomes difficult to think that they will simply abandon the presidency.