Nayib Bukele claims landslide victory and says Spanish democracy is a colonial fraud in impassioned speech to supporters
Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s millennial president, attacked Spanish colonialism and imperialism in a fiery victory speech after he won a landslide victory.
Amid claims he is turning the country into a dictatorship, he boasted to flag-waving crowds below the presidential palace that El Salvador would be the first country with “a one-party system in a democracy”.
“The entire opposition together was pulverised,” Mr Bukele, who once styled himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, told the cheering masses.
The baseball cap-wearing Mr Bukele, 42, has become vastly popular for his war on gangs, but he has also been accused of stifling the courts and silencing opposition.
In his speech he said a Spanish journalist had recently asked him why he wants to dismantle democracy.
I fully expect to get downvoted for this but as much as im anti-dictator (like any normal person) you cannot deny he has objectively been a good thing for the country so far. He has decimated the gangs which has caused a 70% decrease in the homicide rate, going from the highest in the world to the lowest in Latin America. And him being talked as a “dictator” isnt really accurate either. He was elected Mayor of the capital at fist, was extremely popular so ran for president and won, democratically, in a landslide. And his policies, specifically with that gangs has kept him at a mind-boggling 90% approval rating, making him the most popular leader of any country, and he is running for re-election fairly and democratically, because why would he even need to rig the results when hes so insanely popular?
Yes there is Plenty you can criticise him for (being anti-aborition and anti-gay marriage for example) but in that regard he is no worse than any previous leader of the country.
He’s not a dictator yet, but he’ll have the opportunity to rewrite the constitution with the numbers his party will get in the next election. He seems to have signalled this is what he plans to do. Given his economic policies and the fact that he runs a police state (even if it was temporarily needed to get rid of gangs I doubt it will stop), he looks a lot like Pinochet which gives some people pause.
That said it’s up to the people of El Salvador to decide if it’s worth the risk to hand one party all the power.
Edit: current election not next election
Imagine the opposition was inviting gang leaders to decide what to do with the country.
That’s what happened and it’s documented in video.
Why would anybody vote for them?
Bunch of people in this comment thread have no idea what they are talking about. I have family in various parts of el Salvador and ever since bukele came into office politics is all they fucking talk about. It’s actually quite annoying but the people there absolutely love him and his party. Maybe I am biased as I also have family that hold positions in nuevas ideas. Either way I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Salvadorean that didn’t love the direction the country is going.
People on this site insist that we need to eliminate the Republican Party in the US, effectively making it a one-party system in a democracy.
Doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?
Multi-party, new party…maybe…but single party, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone advocate for that, certainly not a lot of people.
We don’t need to eliminate the Republican party, we just need to let it eliminate itself from a plethora of choice.
Not for me. The GOP wants to wipe out the Democrats so it all evens out.
We do need to eliminate the Republican party but that’s far from the only problem with US politics. Honestly, moving away from a first past the post voting system would force both Democrats and Republicans to do better, or get replaced by parties that better represent their constituency.
Research the Weimar Republic. Getting rid of first past the post, can have the opposite effect, giving the crazies more power than they would under first past. Fringe groups, especially left leaning, always want transferrable vote or proportional because that way they’d get more representation but they always seem to ignore it can backfire.
Yes, this but the party eliminated most likely in a one party system would be the democrats.