El Salvador’s ruling party, led by President Nayib Bukele, approved constitutional changes in the National Assembly on Thursday that would permit indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Representative Ana Figueroa of the New Ideas party introduced the changes, which affect five articles of the constitution. The proposal also seeks to eliminate the election’s second round, in which the top two vote-getters from the first round compete.
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly swiftly approved the proposals, leveraging their supermajority. The vote passed 57 to 3.
Bukele won reelection overwhelmingly last year, despite a constitutional ban. Supreme Court justices selected by his party had ruled in 2021 that the ban allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
“All of them have had the possibility of reelection through popular vote; the only exception until now has been the presidency,” Figueroa stated.
She also proposed shortening Bukele’s current term, scheduled to end June 1, 2029, to conclude on June 1, 2027. This would align presidential and congressional elections and allow Bukele to seek reelection to a longer term two years earlier.
Marcela Villatoro of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), one of three dissenting votes, told her fellow lawmakers, “Democracy in El Salvador has died!”
“You don’t realize what indefinite reelection brings: It brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy… there’s corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and halts democracy and political participation,” she said.
Suecy Callejas, the assembly’s vice president, asserted that “power has returned to the only place that it truly belongs… to the Salvadoran people.”
