El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele gives a press conference in San Salvador, El Salvador, January 14, 2025
THE party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele changed the country’s constitution on Thursday, extending his term to six years and letting him run an unlimited number of times.
Ana Figueroa, from the New Ideas party, proposed the changes to the country’s Legislative Assembly which quickly approved them with 57 lawmakers in favour and three opposed.
President Bukele, who once dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” overwhelmingly won re-election last year despite a constitutional ban after Supreme Court justices, selected by his party, ruled in 2021 to allow re-election for a second five-year term.
Marcela Villatoro of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, one of three votes against the proposals, told her fellow lawmakers that “democracy in El Salvador has died.”
“You don’t realise what indefinite re-election brings: it brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy. There’s corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and halts democracy and political participation,” she said.
President Bukele did not immediately comment.
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