Nuevas Ideas, the party that holds a legislative supermajority in El Salvador, held internal elections on Sunday and announced on Monday, via Twitter, that it had ratified President Nayib Bukele's candidacy for the February 2027 election [1]. Vice President Félix Ulloa will again run as his mate. Bukele, 44, took office in June 2019; a third consecutive term would carry him toward a decade and a half in power.
The announcement itself is small — a party naming its ticket. What it clears is larger. Bukele's February 2024 reelection, won with nearly 85% of valid votes, drew objections from constitutional scholars because a consecutive second term violated the charter as it then stood [1]. A September 2021 ruling by the Constitutional Court had permitted reelection "for one term only." Critics, including lawyers who accuse Bukele of stacking that court and replacing the attorney general, say the path to 2024 ran through judges he installed.
The ground has since moved to meet him. In July 2025 the ruling-party Legislative Assembly approved a constitutional reform allowing indefinite presidential reelection [1]. The same reform stretched the presidential term from five years to six, pulled the next election forward to 2027, and stripped the penalties — including loss of citizenship rights — once attached to promoting reelection. Monday's ratification is the first candidacy filed inside that rewritten frame, not a challenge to it.
Bukele has defended the changes on their merits. "90% of developed countries allow the indefinite reelection of their head of government and nobody bats an eye," he said, arguing that when "a small, poor country like El Salvador" does the same, "it suddenly becomes the end of democracy" [1].
The party's case runs on results, and the results are real: after 6,656 murders in 2015 — a rate of 106 per 100,000 — the government reported 82 homicides in all of 2025 [1]. That number carries a bill. The four-year state of emergency credited for the drop has imprisoned more than 90,000 Salvadorans, and human rights groups count more than 500 deaths in custody since it began, mostly from health causes but some from violence [1]. To Bukele's supporters an 85% mandate settles the question of a third term; the lawyer Ingrid Escobar, director of Humanitarian Legal Aid, treats it as the thing to fear: "Remaining in power is to avoid accountability for grave acts of corruption and crimes against humanity" [1]. A ratified candidacy is a step onto a ballot, not a term served — and popularity has not answered whether it is legal.
-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing