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

Members of the media gather outside Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London, as BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness resign following accusations of bias and the controversy surrounding the editing of the Trump speech before the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021 in a BBC Panorama documentary.
(Credit Image: © Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire)

+26: Two BBC leaders, Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Head Deborah Turness, resigned on Sunday after it emerged that the British news organization edited footage of US President Donald Trump in a misleading fashion.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) heads back to his office following a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on November 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C. The shutdown of the Federal Government has become the longest in U.S. history after surpassing the 35 day shutdown that occurred during President Trumps first term that began in the end of 2018.
(Photo by Samuel Corum/Sipa USA)

Pope Leo XIV presides over a mass at Saint John Lateran archbasilica in Vatican City on November 9, 2025.

VATICAN MEDIA / Catholic Press Photo

It’s been six months since the Catholic Church elected its first American pope, Leo XIV. Since then, the Chicago-born pontiff has had sharp words for US President Donald Trump.

Behind every scam lies a story — and within every story, a critical lesson. Anatomy of a Scam, takes you inside the world of modern fraud — from investment schemes to impersonation and romance scams. You'll meet the investigators tracking down bad actors and learn about the innovative work being done across the payments ecosystem to protect consumers and businesses alike. Watch the first episode of Mastercard's five-part documentary, 'Anatomy of a Scam,' here.

- YouTube

On Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer breaks down how the US and China are both betting their futures on massive infrastructure booms, with China building cities and railways while America builds data centers and grid updates for AI. But are they building too much, too fast?