Bukele Gets Green Light for Reelection Bid in El Salvador
Nayib Bukele will be able to run for consecutive reelection in February 2024 despite claims of unconstitutionality.
HAVANA TIMES – The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) of El Salvador approved the enrollment of Nayib Bukele’s presidential candidacy for the Nuevas Ideas party (NI) to seek immediate reelection in February 2024, despite the requests for its rejection and claims of unconstitutionality.
The electoral body informed this November 3, on its social networks that the decision to enroll the NI formula, consisting of Bukele and his vice-president, Felix Ulloa, was made with four votes of the five TSE magistrates.
Nayib Bukele thus became the first president of the Salvadoran democratic era to become a candidate for consecutive reelection, the last precedent having occurred under the military dictatorship with Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1935.
Other candidacies besides Nayib Bukele
The Electoral Tribunal pointed out in the same publication that the presidential formula of the opposition and former guerrilla group, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN, left), headed by Manuel Flores, will also be enrolled.
“The TSE voted to enroll the presidential formula of the FMLN party; to register with four votes and one abstention of the magistrate Julio Olivo, the presidential formula of the Nuevas Ideas Party, after confirming that they fulfill the legal requirements. The rest of the formulas must correct precautionary measures”, states the message.
Bukele made his intention official to seek reelection on October 26, a few minutes before the deadline expired and with dozens of his followers waiting outside the headquarters of the Electoral Tribunal.
“The Salvadoran people will decide if they want to continue building the new El Salvador or if they want to return to the past (…) We are going, with God’s help, to bury this opposition. For that, we need to sweep all the polls”, said the president then in a statement, accompanied by a heavy security detail.
Voices for and against the path to reelection
The approval of the TSE to Bukele’s candidacy, which he advanced back in September 2021, was given hours after lawyers of a civil movement and opposition legislative candidates presented their requests to disqualify the president.
The road to Bukele’s reelection was cleared in 2021, when the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, which the opposition-majority Congress had appointed without following the legal procedure, changed a criterion of interpretation of the Constitution.
The judges, considered by the United States to be “loyal” to Bukele’s Administration, among them former advisors and former lawyers of high-ranking officials, indicated that the prohibition of immediate reelection is for a ruler who has been in power for ten years.
Before this change, a president had to finish his 5-year term and wait ten years to seek the presidency again.
According to congressional candidate David Elías, the “judicial decree” issued by the Constitutional Chamber isn’t valid since said Chamber is currently made up of “usurpers.”
Various lawyers, civil organizations, and the Faculty of Jurisprudence and Social Sciences of the State University of El Salvador (UES) assert that immediate presidential reelection is prohibited in at least six articles of the Salvadoran Constitution.
For their part, pro-government analysts say that Bukele should leave the presidency on December 1, 2023, six months before the end of his term as president.
Before becoming president, Bukele used to affirm that “in El Salvador, the same person cannot be president twice in a row.”
Upon reaching El Salvador’s presidency in 2019, Nayib Bukele labeled Juan Orlando Hernández and Daniel Ortega as “dictators” who could reelect themselves in Honduras and Nicaragua, respectively, thanks to constitutional court rulings.