Nayib Bukele

Biography

Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez (born 24 July 1981) is a Salvadoran politician and businessman who has served as the 81st president of El Salvador since 2019. In 1999, Bukele established an advertising company and worked at an advertising company owned by his father, Armando Bukele Kattán. Both companies advertised election campaigns for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) political party. Bukele entered politics in 2011. In 2012, he joined the FMLN and was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Bukele served until his 2015 election as Mayor of San Salvador, where he served until 2018. In 2017, Bukele was ousted from the FMLN. He founded the Nuevas Ideas political party shortly afterward and pursued a presidential campaign in 2019. After the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) refused to register his party, Bukele ran for president with the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) and won with 53 percent of the vote. In July 2019, Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan to reduce El Salvador's 2019 homicide rate of 38 per 100,000. Homicides fell by 50% during Bukele's first year in office. After 87 were killed by gangs over one weekend in March 2022, Bukele initiated a nationwide gang crackdown, resulting in the arrests of over 85,000 with alleged affiliations by December 2024. El Salvador's homicide rate decreased to 1.9 homicides per 100,000 in 2024, one of the lowest in the Americas. Bukele passed a law in 2021 that made bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador and promoted plans to build Bitcoin City. In June 2023, the Legislative Assembly approved Bukele's proposals to reduce the number of municipalities from 262 to 44 and the number of seats in the legislature from 84 to 60. He ran for re-election in the 2024 presidential election and won with 85% of the vote after the Supreme Court of Justice reinterpreted the constitution's ban on consecutive re-election. Bukele is highly popular in El Salvador, where he has held a job approval rating above 75% during his entire presidency and averages above 90% approval, and is popular throughout Latin America. However, El Salvador has also experienced democratic backsliding under Bukele's leadership. From 2019 to 2025, El Salvador fell 61 places in the World Press Freedom Index and 24 places in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, which now classifies El Salvador as a hybrid regime. In February 2020, Bukele ordered 40 soldiers into the Legislative Assembly building to intimidate lawmakers into approving a US$109 million loan for the Territorial Control Plan, an event that triggered a political crisis and was described by the opposition as a self-coup. After Nuevas Ideas won a supermajority in the 2021 legislative election, Bukele's allies in the legislature voted to replace the attorney general and all five justices of the Supreme Court of Justice's Constitutional Chamber. Bukele has attacked journalists, news outlets, and furthered press censorship. Following a controversial constitutional amendment on 31 July 2025, the Legislative Assembly enabled indefinite reelection, extended presidential terms from five to six years, and eliminated the two-round system.