New Ideas, the ruling party of El Salvador’s reelected President Nayib Bukele, who is known for his support of Bitcoin (BTC), has secured a supermajority in the country’s legislature.
On February 20, the body responsible for overseeing El Salvador’s elections announced that the New Ideas party had won 54 out of the 60 seats in the legislature, ensuring that Bukele would have the political power to continue his agenda. These results were part of the elections that took place on February 4. Interestingly, Bukele had already declared victory on February 5, even before the official results were released, claiming that the New Ideas party had won 58 seats instead of 54.
However, despite the president’s assertions of victory in the legislature, opposition groups have been demanding that the results be invalidated, alleging voter fraud. Vamos, Nuestro Tiempo, and Nationalist Republican Alliance reportedly discovered 69 “anomalies” in the electoral process. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front party has also made similar claims of fraud and voter manipulation.
Bukele assumed office in June 2019 and quickly established himself as one of the few world leaders who openly support cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. In September 2021, he called on the Salvadoran government to adopt BTC as legal tender, a move that was supported by the New Ideas party, which held a supermajority in the government at the time.
While Bukele has branded himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” his tenure as the nation’s leader has been marred by reports of human rights violations in his efforts to combat gang violence and homicides in El Salvador. A United Nations report from March 2023 highlighted that El Salvador had implemented “mass detentions” since 2022, resulting in numerous deaths and mistreatment of detainees.
During his time in office, the Supreme Court of El Salvador amended the rules to allow a president to serve two consecutive terms, bypassing the previous requirement of waiting 10 years before seeking reelection. Bukele resigned from his position in December 2023 to focus on his campaign, leaving Claudia Rodríguez de Guevara as the acting president until June 2024.
Bukele is scheduled to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. on February 22. The event will feature prominent members of the far-right wing of the Republican Party in the United States, as well as Argentine President Javier Milei, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and former United States President Donald Trump.
In summary, the New Ideas party’s supermajority in the legislature gives President Bukele the political leverage to continue his pro-Bitcoin agenda. However, allegations of voter fraud and human rights violations during his tenure have cast a shadow over his leadership in El Salvador.