 Official portrait | |
| Presidency of Nayib Bukele 1 June 2019 – present | |
| Cabinet | Cabinet of Nayib Bukele |
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| Party | Nuevas Ideas |
| Election | 2019 • 2024 |
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In June 2019, Nayib Bukele was inaugurated as the 81st president of El Salvador. He oversaw El Salvador's response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and experimented with classifying Bitcoin as a national legal tender. Bukele passed a law in 2021 that made bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador and promoted plans to build Bitcoin City. By 2025, El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had largely been unsuccessful.
Bukele weathered two political crises in 2020 and 2021 which ultimately strengthened his Nuevas Ideas party. In February 2020, Bukele ordered 40 soldiers into the Legislative Assembly building to intimidate lawmakers into approving a US$109 million loan for the Territorial Control Plan. After Nuevas Ideas won a supermajority in the 2021 legislative election, Bukele's allies in the legislature voted to replace the attorney general and all five justices of the Supreme Court of Justice's Constitutional Chamber. Bukele has attacked journalists and news outlets on social media, drawing allegations of press censorship.
In July 2019, Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan to combat gang violence and reduce El Salvador's homicide rate, which at the time was 38 per 100,000 people. Homicides fell by 50 percent during Bukele's first year in office. Digital news outlet El Faro and the United States Department of State accused Bukele's government of secretly negotiating with gangs to reduce the homicide rate. After 87 people were killed by gangs over one weekend in March 2022, Bukele initiated a nationwide state of emergency and crackdown on gangs, resulting in the arrests of over 85,000 people with alleged gang affiliations by December 2024. El Salvador's homicide rate decreased to 1.9 homicides per 100,000 in 2024, one of the lowest in the Americas. The resulting crackdown on organized crime has generally been characterized as reducing gang activity and violence at the cost of widespread arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses.[1]: 84
In June 2023, the Legislative Assembly approved Bukele's proposals to reduce the number of municipalities from 262 to 44 and the number of seats in the legislature from 84 to 60. He ran for re-election in the 2024 presidential election and won with 85 percent of the vote after the Supreme Court of Justice reinterpreted the constitution's ban on consecutive re-election. Bukele's government pursued further constitutional changes in 2025, allowing indefinite presidential re-election, extending the presidential term from five to six years, and eliminating runoff elections.
Bukele is highly popular in El Salvador, where he has held a job approval rating above 75% during his entire presidency and averages above 90% approval. He is also popular throughout Latin America. Critics say El Salvador has experienced democratic backsliding under Bukele, as he has dismantled democratic institutions, curtailed political and civil liberties, and attacked independent media and the political opposition.
- ^ Meléndez-Sánchez, Manuel; Vergara, Alberto (July 2024). "The Bukele Model: Will It Spread?". Journal of Democracy. 35 (3). Johns Hopkins University Press: 84–98. doi:10.1353/jod.2024.a930429. ISSN 1086-3214. Archived from the original on 1 July 2024. Retrieved 2 July 2024.