El Salvador approves an indefinite presidential re -election, extends the presidential terms at 6 years old: NPR

San Salvador, El Salvador – The party of the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, approved the constitutional changes of the National Assembly of the country on Thursday which will allow an indefinite presidential re -election and extend the presidential terms at six years.

The Ana Figueroa legislator of the New Ideas Party had proposed the modifications to five articles of the Constitution. The proposal also included the elimination of the second round of the elections where the two best votes in the first round are faced.

New ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote was adopted with 57 in favor and three opposites.

Bukele was massively won the re -election last year despite a constitutional ban, after the judges of the Supreme Court selected by his party judged in 2021 that it had enabled the re -election of a second five -year term.

Figueroa argued Thursday that federal legislators and mayors can already request a re -election as many times as they wish.

“All have had the possibility of a re -election by popular vote, the only exception has been the presidency,” said Figueroa.

She also proposed that the current mandate of Bukele, planned ending on June 1, 2029, finished rather on June 1, 2027, to organize presidential elections and the congress on the same appendix. This would also allow Bukele to ask for a re -election at a longer term two years earlier.

Marcela Villatoro of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), one of the three votes against the proposals, told her colleagues that “democracy in Salvador had died!”

“You do not realize what indefinite re-election brings: it brings an accumulation of power and weakening democracy … There is corruption and customers because nepotism grows and interrupts democracy and political participation,” she said.

Suecy Callejas, vice-president of the Assembly, said that “power returned to the only place where it really belongs … to the Salvadoran people”.

Bukele did not immediately comment.

Bukele, who once nicknamed “the coolest dictator in the world”, is very popular, largely because of his heavy fight against the powerful street gangs in the country.

Voters were willing to ignore the proof that her administration like others before she negotiated with the gangs, before requesting a state of emergency which suspended certain constitutional rights and allowed the authorities to arrest and encroach thousands of people.

Its success with security and politically inspired imitators in the region who seek to reproduce its style.