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El Salvador's Bukele: The posterboy for popular authoritarianism
Here's one country where democracy is on the backslide, and the increasingly authoritarian leader could not be more popular. El Salvador's Nayib Bukele won the presidency at 37, as Latin America's youngest elected head of state, as an outspoken candidate on social media with an affinity for cryptocurrency.
In a wide-ranging interview on the state of global democracy in 2024, Stanford's Francis Fukuyama explains Bukele's crime-fighting appeal: "El Salvador legitimately elected Nayib Bukele as president, but he embarked on this massive effort to simply round up people that he thought were gang members and put them in prison, no trial, no, judicial process to find out whether they're actually guilty or not. And as a result, around 10% of the young men in the country are now sitting in prison. Uh, and it's been quite successful in reducing the level of gang violence in El Salvador by like 90%."
And Bukele's approval rating today stands at about 90%. It's just one example of a democratically elected leader pushing the boundaries of what his constitutional mandate allows.
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El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele
Strongman with a strong mandate? El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele
Since riding an anti-establishment wave to power in 2019, El Salvador’s young, social-media savvy, mano dura (“firm hand”) President Nayib Bukele has tested the limits of his country’s fragile institutions.
He’s sent armed men into congress to pressure lawmakers, harried the opposition with arrests, packed the courts with loyalists, and raised human rights concerns with his jail-first-ask-questions-later approach towards gang violence.
But he’s also done something remarkable: he’s become one of the most popular democratically elected leaders in the world. After three years in office, his approval rating hovers around 90%.
Last week, high on that popularity, Bukele announced he would seek another five-year presidential term in 2024. The constitution seemed to say he couldn’t, but a court ruling last year by his own judicial appointees paved the way for the move.
Democracy and human rights activists aren’t surprised by the reelection bid. “There’s no news in the fact that he’s running again,” says Juan Pappier, an El Salvador specialist at Human Rights Watch. “He’s been using his popularity to undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law from the start.”
So, why is he so popular? One reason is that Bukele – a political upstart who favors a baseball cap and leather jacket over a suit and tie – represents a stark break from the country’s traditional politics. After a brutal civil war ended in the early 1990s, the warring sides became the two main political parties. As they deadlocked the country’s politics, the economy sputtered and violence soared.
“There was a demand for a third option, something different,” says Risa Grais-Targow, a Latin America specialist at Eurasia Group. “Bukele captured that and capitalized on it.”
Once in power, he quickly dealt well with the pandemic, securing vaccine supplies and setting up vaccination centers much faster than neighboring countries in Central America. But crucially, he also managed to bring down the country’s gang-driven murder rate – one of the world’s highest – by a staggering 67%.
Early on, his crime fight was helped by pandemic lockdowns, and there were whispers that he might even have made a shadowy truce with the country’s powerful gangs. But more recently, he’s used drastic emergency powers that give the police broad leeway to arrest people, particularly in poorer areas where gangs thrive.
There’s a downside. Many, actually. Activists say the gang crackdown has led to thousands of arbitrary detentions in what Amnesty International calls a “human rights crisis.” And they worry about broader moves to bring the country’s institutions under presidential control.
“To deal sustainably with gang violence,” says Pappier of HRW, “you actually need strong judicial institutions that are willing and able to investigate the gangs and to hold those responsible for the horrible abuses that these gangs commit. But that is exactly the opposite of what Bukele has done.”
What’s more, the US and EU have already raised concerns about Bukele playing fast and loose with the rule of law. And with immigration a perennial hot-button issue in US politics, the Biden administration in particular has pressured governments across Central America over corruption and impunity, part of a strategy to address the “root causes” of northward migration.
Pressure from big players matters to small El Salvador. After all, it’s a tiny, resource-poor, dollarized economy with a massive debt burden. The country relies heavily on external financing, and remittances alone account for about a quarter of GDP. Bukele’s splashy bid to become a crypto economy has largely flopped so far, and with little to offer in the way of infrastructure or resources, it can’t really play the China card the way other Latin American countries do.
That may limit how far Bukele’s authoritarian instincts can go. “If El Salvador becomes a pariah,” asks Grais-Targow, “what do they have to keep them going and to keep the population happy?”
But analysts say Bukele is also betting the US won’t push him too hard. For one thing, they say, he seems confident that Donald Trump – or another Republican in his image – will take the White House in 2024, heralding the return of a more transactional approach to foreign policy.
For another, the sensitivity of immigration in American politics may limit how much pressure any administration would put on El Salvador.
“The Bukele administration assumes, probably correctly, that the US would never dream of imposing major economic sanctions on them,” says Grais-Targow. “That would drive more Salvadorans north, which would be a huge domestic political problem for whoever is in the White House.”
The pathway from here is ominous for El Salvador, says Pappier. “We have seen this situation of highly popular leaders destroying the rule of law and evading constitutional limits many times in Latin America — we saw it with Chavez in Venezuela, with Evo Morales in Bolivia – this is the same story. And in the case of Venezuela and others, we have seen where it ended.”
But with strong domestic support, little opposition, and nearly complete control over institutions, the savvy Bukele is in a commanding position to write that story however he likes. For now, the next chapter seems certain to begin in 2024.
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El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele present the plan of "Bitcoin City."
What We’re Watching: Bukele’s crypto bomb, Somalia needs a president
Has El Salavdor’s crypto experiment bombed?
Mass protests erupted last fall after Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s youthful, tech-savvy president with an authoritarian streak, announced that the country would begin accepting Bitcoin as legal tender. Many Salvadorans said Bukele’s embrace of the volatile currency would spur inflation and financial instability. Those warnings have proven prescient. In recent days, the crypto world has been caught in a tailspin, in part because global inflation has lowered investors’ tolerance for risk. Bitcoin and Etherium, the biggest cryptocurrencies, have both declined in value by 20-25% this week – and El Salvador is recording losses of about 37% based on what it forked out for crypto in a series of purchases. This has proven to be a disaster for Bukele: two major credit rating agencies predict El Salavdor will default on its loans. San Salvador has an IMF repayment due in January worth a whopping $800 million, and amid ongoing negotiations earlier this year the international lender warned that “Bitcoin should not be used as an official currency with legal tender status.” Still, the enigmatic Bukele continues to double down: this week, he released plans for the Bitcoin city he touted last fall – a smart city based on the use of the flailing currency.
Somalia's long-overdue presidential election
Fifteen months behind schedule and facing a May 17 deadline to avoid getting cut off from foreign aid, Somalia will finally hold its presidential election on Sunday. There are lots of familiar faces among the 39 candidates, including two former presidents, a former prime minister, and current President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, aka Farmaajo, a former US civil servant. When his term expired in February 2021, Farmaajo convinced the lower house of parliament to unilaterally extend it by two years, and then later backtracked following an outcry from the upper house and donors. He faces a tough challenge, especially from supporters of PM Mohamed Hussein Roble, who for months has been locked in a power struggle with Farmaajo over control of the government. (Roble is not running, but his supporters will follow his lead in parliamentary voting.) Further complicating matters, the vote is a quasi-democratic "indirect" election by all 329 members of parliament in which a candidate needs a two-thirds majority to avoid a runoff. The winner, if we ever get one, will face myriad problems, with security issues topping the list. Just this week, the militant group al-Shabab attacked a site near Mogadishu’s airport, where lawmakers will cast their ballots in a hangar surrounded by armed troops.
Crypto fans ignore its ups and downs
In the past few weeks, the value of cryptocurrencies has been slashed by half over fear, uncertainty, and doubt (aka FUD) of US interest rate hikes and new regulation.
That means NYC Mayor Eric Adams, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and basketball star Klay Thompson all face pay cuts because they get their salaries in crypto.
Yet, the crypto bros out there have not lost faith.
El Salvador’s crypto-loving President Nayib Bukele is still going strong, ignoring calls by the IMF to stop using bitcoin as legal tender.
What's the big deal about bitcoin anyway?
Critics say it's a Ponzi scheme for criminals. The online black market does take bitcoin, which is also the go-to payment scheme in rug-pull scams.
But crypto fans insist that the tech is anonymous, secure, and unhackable. Not to mention cutting out the middleman: untrustworthy banks.
In fact, crypto has already gone so mainstream that Goldman Sachs predicts it'll compete with gold, and JP says that blockchain will be the backbone of Web 3.0 — a new, more decentralized internet.
The flip side: it could also go to zero.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Does China's rise have to mean America's decline?
Demonstrators holding placards against the government's Bitcoin law while making gestures, during the protest. Thousands of Salvadorans took to the streets on El Salvador's Bicentennial Independence Day against El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele and his government's policies
What We’re Watching: Salvadorans protest Bitcoin, meet Aukus, no COVID pass no job in Italy
Salvadorans protest Bukele, Bitcoin: Thousands of people took to the streets of El Salvador's capital on Wednesday, the 200th anniversary of the country's independence, to protest against President Nayib Bukele's increasingly authoritarian streak and his embrace of risky cryptocurrency. Last May, Bukele ended the Supreme Court's independence; perhaps unsurprisingly, the court then decided to lift the constitutional ban on presidential term limits — presumably so Bukele can run for reelection in 2024. Meanwhile, last week El Salvador became the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, but the rollout was, to put it mildly, messy. The protesters resent Bukele's dictator vibes and warn that Bitcoin could spur inflation and financial instability. The tech-savvy president, for his part, insists that crypto will bring in more cash from remittances and foreign investment, and remains immensely popular among most Salvadorans. Still, Bukele's Bitcoin gamble could erode his support if the experiment fails.
Aukus vs China: The newly announced US-UK-Australia Asia-Pacific security partnership doesn't mention China by name, but everyone with eyes can see: it's about China. With Aukus — as this new alliance is now informally known until someone comes up with a better acronym — the Biden administration wants to do two things. First, boost Australia's naval defense capability — in particular by giving the Aussies the tech to build nuclear-powered attack submarines that can withstand Chinese anti-ship missiles. Second, work with the Aussies and the Brits to jointly develop more advanced weapons that'll be a better match for China's increasingly high-tech military. Beijing says Aukus is the latest example of Western powers stuck in "Cold War mentality," while France, which was about to sell Australia a bunch of its own conventional subs, is fuming at the Aussies backing out of the deal, and at all three Aukus partners for being kept out of the loop. However there are limits to Anglophone affection: New Zealand has already said please no Aussie nuclear subs in our waters, thanks mate.
Italy mandates COVID passes for all workers: Italy will soon become the first EU country to make the bloc's COVID "Green Pass" mandatory for all workers, not just healthcare personnel. Although the goal of the digital certificate — which shows whether someone has been vaccinated, tested negative, or recently recovered from the virus — was to facilitate travel between EU member states, the unity government led by PM Mario Draghi now wants to use it to force skeptical Italians to get the jab. Italian unions have pushed back a bit, upset at the 1,000 euro ($1,175) fines for non-compliance and having to pay 15 euros for tests, but the mandate is backed by most employers and political parties. Italy's move comes amid an ongoing debate over vaccine mandates in Europe, and a week after President Joe Biden ordered vaccination or weekly COVID testing for most US workers.
El Salvador’s risky move to Bitcoin; future of Singapore patrol robots
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses trends in big tech, privacy protection and cyberspace:
El Salvador becomes the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Is this a risky move?
Well, it is unclear who ought to benefit most of the President's move to adopt Bitcoin. Poor shopkeepers, wealthy investors, or he himself. With arguments that remittances are expensive and the future is digital, President Bukele leapt forward. But the immediate value drop of Bitcoin was a live reminder of the cryptocurrencies' volatility. One silver lining is that others can learn from the lessons that El Salvador will learn under this new spotlight.
Singapore starts trialing patrol robots to deter bad social behavior. Will robots be used for law enforcement soon?
Well, I certainly hope not because the further and further rollout of a surveillance state is often justified with arguments of safety, security, or convenience. But by adding robots, the intensification of policing public spaces is hidden behind a novelty of fun innovation. If anything, Singaporeans can use more personal space and freedom. And sure, that may mean that some people engage in "bad behavior," such as parking a car or a bike outside of the street lines, but as a Dutch person who has parked a few bikes in her life before, I can tell you that should not be a crime.