The nomination, without the drama
Nayib Bukele no longer needs to campaign for his own party's blessing — he already has it. On July 13, Nuevas Ideas confirmed that its 44-year-old leader will carry the ticket into the February 28, 2027 election, running again with Vice President Félix Ulloa, his partner since 2019. Neither man faced a rival in Sunday's internal vote. The party's own website simply posted a ranked list of "winners" alongside Bukele's photo, without disclosing a vote count or confirming any opposing candidate had even entered the race.
The paperwork trail started two weeks earlier. Xavi Zablah Bukele — the party's president and the sitting president's cousin — posted "Estamos listos" ("We're ready") alongside stamped registration forms on June 28, with the confirmation message landing on social media just after midnight heading into June 29. Formal registration with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal still lies ahead, scheduled for October 1 through November 19. Assuming that goes as expected, Salvadorans will pick a president, all 60 legislators, and every municipal council on a single day next February.
How Congress cleared the runway
The path here didn't run through the courts or a popular referendum — it ran through the Legislative Assembly, in an afternoon. On July 31, 2025, lawmakers voted 57 to 3 to strike presidential term limits from the constitution entirely, part of a bundle that also stretched the presidential term from five years to six, scrapped the second-round runoff, and trimmed Bukele's own second term — originally due to run to 2029 — so the presidential race would line up with the 2027 legislative and municipal contests.
None of that would have been possible in a single session a year earlier. A separate, quieter amendment to Article 248 — passed by the outgoing assembly in April 2024 and ratified by the incoming one that January — removed the old requirement that constitutional changes get approved by one legislature and ratified by the next. Without that groundwork, the July 2025 package couldn't have gone from introduction to law in roughly the time it takes to watch a film.
The 2021 ruling that cracked the door open first
This wasn't the first time judges bent to fit Bukele's timeline. In September 2021, a Constitutional Chamber seated months earlier — after Bukele's legislative majority removed the sitting magistrates and attorney general — decided that consecutive re-election was legal, but strictly capped at one additional term. That opening carried him to a landslide 2024 win with nearly 85 percent of valid votes, a result constitutional lawyers broadly criticized as resting on an improperly stacked court. The 2025 reform simply knocked out the ceiling that same court had left in place three years earlier.
El Salvador safer than many developed nations
Strip away the legal maneuvering, and Bukele's staying power arguably comes down to one statistic he can point to at any rally: homicides. El Salvador logged 6,656 murders in 2015 — a rate around 106 per 100,000 people, among the highest recorded anywhere outside active war zones. The government's tally for 2025 came in at 82 killings nationwide, a number officials call full clearance and the lowest on record. Independent pollsters this year have put his approval anywhere from the mid-80s into the mid-90s, well above the roughly 80 percent baseline that held for much of his presidency. Bukele has defended the reelection push in blunt terms, arguing that "90% of developed countries allow the indefinite reelection of their head of government" without international objection, and that outrage only arrives when a poorer nation tries the same thing.
What the crackdown costs, measured in bodies and cells
The engine behind that homicide drop is a state of exception that has run continuously since March 2022, suspending rights to counsel, to be told the reason for arrest, and to privacy of communication. Official counts put the number of people detained under it above 91,500 as of this spring, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate of any country tracked. The same monitoring bodies count at least 500 deaths in custody since the policy began, most attributed to medical causes and some to violence, though independent verification remains difficult given restricted prison access.
The pressure hasn't stayed confined to accused gang members. Anti-corruption lawyer Ruth López was jailed last year, and dozens of journalists have left the country rather than risk prosecution. Cristosal, one of the region's oldest human rights monitors, shut down its Salvadoran operations in July 2025 after its director said the government had "unleashed a wave of repression" that made staying too dangerous. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have all condemned the reforms; Human Rights Watch's 2026 country report describes a government still tightening its grip on courts, prosecutors, and critics alike. Opposition deputy Marcela Villatoro, one of only three no votes on the July 2025 package, offered the line that traveled furthest afterward: "Democracy in El Salvador has died." Vamos, one of the few opposition parties still holding seats, has opted out of the presidential race altogether, choosing to spend its resources on legislative and municipal contests instead.
The economic ledger compared to the security statistics
Bitcoin's rocky 2021 debut as legal tender never won over ordinary Salvadorans, and the government rewrote the law in January 2025 to drop the mandatory-acceptance requirement — a condition tied to a $1.4 billion International Monetary Fund program. It's a more nuanced retreat than "abolished" suggests: lawmakers stripped out the word "currency" and the obligation for merchants to take bitcoin, while some of the original "legal tender" language technically remained on the books, leaving economists debating exactly what status the coin still holds. The government kept buying anyway, and a bitcoin selloff in February 2026 erased hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve value and rattled the country's bond market, complicating talks with the Fund only weeks after it had praised an economy "expanding at a faster than anticipated pace," with growth near 4 percent.
Should Bukele win in February, he'd be 51 when his term ends in 2033 — 14 years after he first took office.
