The Salvador of El Salvador?

Here is a sentence you have read some version of many, many times in recent years:

The candidate surged to a once-unlikely victory over his establishment opponents after a campaign in which he skillfully deployed social media, railed against traditional political parties, and pledged to stamp out corruption.

On Sunday, Salvadoran businessman Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of his country's capital, became the latest political outsider to fit this description, winning the first round of El Salvador's presidential election outright with nearly 54 percent of the vote.


His victory was a sharp rebuke to the country's two main parties – the FMLN and ARENA. They grew out of warring factions of the country's brutal civil war and have run El Salvador for more than a quarter of a century since.

The youthful Mr. Bukele, who sports a leather jacket rather than suits and ties, and who campaigned under the bold slogan "there's enough money if nobody steals," will now take control over one of the most violent countries on earth.

Nearly 70,000 Salvadorans belong to gangs, and though the murder rate has fallen in recent years, it still trails only Venezuela as the most violent country in the world's most violent region.

Bukele has pledged to stamp out graft, help the poor, and continue the crackdown on crime. If he is able to do so, it would represent a remarkable turnaround for a deeply scarred country. What's more, instability in El Salvador has affected its neighbors, contributing to northward migration flows that are the subject of such bitter political rancor in the United States.

But Mr. Bukele also has a problem that is all too common for many of today's political upstarts – his party, GANA, controls just 11 seats out of 84 in congress, meaning that in order to make good on his promises, he'll have to work with precisely the parties he railed against on the campaign trail.

Being an outsider is an increasingly good way to win elections. But as elsewhere, it remains to be seen whether Bukele can actually deliver on the outsized promises that carried him to victory.

More from GZERO Media

RPG-7 training of Ukrainian soldiers. November 17, 2024.
  • Adrien Vautier via Reuters Connect

People from different cultures often approach the same problem in different ways. We wondered — would an AI trained and tuned in China approach a complex geopolitical challenge differently than a model created and trained in Europe, or in the United States?

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks to the members of the media, after arriving by plane to attend the Gaza Peace Summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, October 13, 2025.
Yoan Valat/Pool via REUTERS

2: French President Emmanuel Macron rejected calls to resign as his fragile government faces two no-confidence votes this week.

Palestinian children look at rubble following Israeli forces' withdrawal from the area, after Israel and Hamas agreed on the Gaza ceasefire, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, October 10, 2025.
REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

Israel approved the Gaza ceasefire deal on Friday morning, bringing the ceasefire officially into effect. The Israeli military must withdraw its forces to an agreed perimeter inside Gaza within 24 hours, and Hamas has 72 hours to return the hostages.