On July 31, 2025, President Nayib Bukele used his legislative supermajority to reform the Salvadoran constitution. In a matter of hours, and with no public consultation, El Salvador’s rubber-stamp legislature voted, among other reforms, to allow indefinite presidential reelection, to lengthen the presidential term from five to six years, and to replace the country’s presidential run-off system with a single-round, first-past-the-post contest (Regalado et al. 2025).
Some observers were quick to warn that these reforms put Salvadoran democracy on life support. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, for example, said that the amendments represented a “serious reversal for democracy and the rule of law” (CIDH 2025). The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) warned that the reforms constituted “a direct threat to democracy” and set “a worrying precedent for Latin America” (LASA 2025). And Human Rights Watch concluded that “democracy in El Salvador is dying” (Goebertus Estrada 2025).
But such warnings were far too optimistic: El Salvador had ceased to be a democracy more than four years before these reforms came to pass. On May 1, 2021, Bukele—then nearing the end of his second year in office—used his newly minted legislative supermajority to overthrow and replace the country’s top court and top prosecutor (Levitsky and Meléndez-Sánchez 2021). In the months and years following this autogolpe, Bukele eliminated or captured all other checks and balances on the presidency. He decimated the opposition and cracked down on dissent, imprisoning some of his critics and forcing many others into exile (Janetsky 2025; Martínez and Martínez 2025). He ignored a constitutional ban on reelection (Perelló and Navia 2024), secured a second term in a contest that was marked by serious irregularities (Meléndez-Sánchez 2024), and gerrymandered the electoral map to put El Salvador on track to become all but a one-party state (Acción Ciudadana 2024a and 2024b). And, enabled by the “state of exception”—his now-famous gang crackdown—Bukele’s government imprisoned over 1 percent of the population without oversight or due process (Amnesty International 2023; Janetsky 2024). In short, long before the Legislative Assembly met to amend the constitution, Bukele had buried Salvadoran democracy and established, in its place, a regime that was unambiguously authoritarian and, by all appearances, remarkably robust.
The true goal of the July 2025 reforms was not to establish but to future-proof the authoritarian regime. Today, Bukele is in a position of formidable strength: he commands overwhelming levels of support among Salvadorans, has no serious domestic challengers, and, especially since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, benefits from an international environment that not only enables but actively rewards his authoritarian practices (Correal and Baskar 2025; Hudson et al. 2025). Future-proofing a regime, however, often requires preempting threats that only become evident in the long term. And, if one takes this longer view, there are at least three scenarios that could one day threaten Bukele’s grip on power—all of which the July 2025 reforms help address.
First, Bukele could eventually begin to lose popular support. Since becoming president in 2019, almost every serious poll has placed Bukele’s public approval well above 70 percent—a remarkable feat even for a populist strongman.[1] In the 2024 election, these numbers alone meant that no one could seriously challenge Bukele at the ballot box. But there may come a time when Bukele can no longer safely rely on his ability to mobilize an electoral majority. The reforms help protect the regime against this scenario by abolishing the presidential run-off: under the new first-past-the-post system, Bukele will never again need to command an electoral majority in order to be reelected.
Second, even if most voters continue to back Bukele himself, the opposition could eventually begin to make inroads in legislative or local elections. Despite Bukele’s popularity, surveys suggest that voters are significantly less enthusiastic about his mayors and legislators, who depend largely on coattail effects (and an uneven playing field) to get elected.[2] Future legislative and local elections could therefore provide the opposition a rare opportunity to organize, grow, and begin challenging Bukele’s monopoly on power. But the reforms help preempt this scenario by maximizing Bukele’s coattail effects. They accomplish this by overhauling the electoral calendar. Before the reforms, legislative and municipal elections rarely took place in the same calendar year as presidential elections: the former were held every three years, the latter every five. This staggered electoral calendar likely had a significant attenuating effect on presidential coattails. The reforms lengthen the presidential term from five to six years and move the next presidential election forward from 2029 to 2027, when legislative and municipal elections were already set to take place. This means that, under the new system, every other legislative and municipal election will coincide with a presidential election. As long as Bukele remains popular, this will help more of his legislators and mayors get elected on his coattails.
Finally, even under the terms of the convoluted 2021 court ruling that rubber-stamped his first reelection bid, Bukele would have been constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term.[3] Come 2029 (now 2027), this hurdle essentially left Bukele with three options. First, Bukele could have appointed a loyal figurehead to serve out a term, formally stepping down but continuing to rule through a surrogate until his official return. This, however, is a risky strategy that has backfired for the likes of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia. (Further complicating this path, it is possible that the 2021 court ruling would actually have forced Bukele to sit out two, not one, presidential terms.)[4] Second, Bukele could simply have ignored the constitution—but at the steep price of blatantly abandoning any veneer of constitutional legitimacy. Instead, Bukele opted for a third path: to eliminate term limits altogether via constitutional reform, a strategy that allows him to remain in office indefinitely while maintaining a claim to constitutional legitimacy.
In short, the July 2025 reforms have helped future-proof El Salvador’s authoritarian regime by removing all presidential term limits and by protecting the regime against two possible future threats: a decline in Bukele’s popularity and new opposition in-roads in legislative and municipal elections. Bukele—Latin America’s youngest autocrat—could now remain in power for decades to come.
On Fighting Corruption and Fighting Crime: Two Lessons for Latin America
Even in an era of democratic backsliding, this is a remarkable outcome. Indeed, since 2019, El Salvador has followed an extraordinary trajectory.
When Bukele took office in June of that year, El Salvador had been an imperfect but remarkably stable democracy for 25 years. By 2021, it had become a competitive authoritarian regime. And, by the following year, it had clearly begun to resemble a purer form of authoritarianism. In the twenty-first century, few—if any—Latin American democracies have “backslid” as dramatically and as quickly as El Salvador. Countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela have descended further into authoritarianism, but over significantly longer periods of time. And countries like Honduras and Peru have arguably experienced more abrupt breakdowns in the constitutional order—but without descending as far, or as permanently, into authoritarian rule.
Moreover, few leaders have ever inspired as many admirers across the region as Bukele. In the 2023 Latinobarómetro survey, for example, Bukele had by far the highest favorability rating of any major leader in the region even if Salvadoran respondents were not counted (Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara 2024). Meanwhile, “a growing list of admirers” among Latin American politicians has vowed to replicate Bukele’s hard-on-crime policies (Freeman 2023). And the Salvadoran president has even emerged as “a hero of the [US] right,” a status boosted by his high-profile dealings with the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (Linthicum 2025). “As politicians from Mexico to Guatemala vow to emulate Mr. Bukele’s iron-fisted approach,” warned The New York Times in April 2023, “critics have grown concerned that the country could become a model for a dangerous bargain: sacrificing civil liberties for safety” (Kitroeff 2023).
But even as it threatens to serve as a template for aspiring autocrats, El Salvador can also offer important lessons for those who would seek to protect democracy. I wish here to highlight two such lessons—one that is often overlooked, and another that is often misunderstood.
The first lesson concerns the double-edged nature of fighting corruption. It is often forgotten that, in the five years leading up to Bukele’s election, Salvadoran institutions accomplished an unprecedented feat: they began to hold powerful politicians from across the political spectrum accountable for corruption. Between 2014 and 2019, for example, three former presidents, a former president of the legislature, a former attorney-general, a former first lady, and numerous mayors and lawmakers were investigated and, in many cases, brought to trial (Meléndez-Sánchez 2021, 27-29).
Fighting corruption—and, more generally, holding politicians accountable for abuse—is essential for strengthening democracy. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Meléndez-Sánchez 2021), in El Salvador these anti-corruption advances also undermined democracy: they helped convince many Salvadorans that the entire political system was corrupt and dysfunctional beyond repair—unintentionally helping set the stage for Bukele’s rise. It is no coincidence that one of Bukele’s most famous 2019 slogans was el dinero alcanza cuando nadie roba—“there is enough money when no one steals.” I suggest that this exemplifies a broader challenge for democratic consolidation:
In the long-run, depoliticizing state institutions, increasing horizontal accountability, and fighting corruption almost certainly strengthen democracy. But they do so at the cost of revealing potentially damaging information about the extent of politicians’ abuses. Therefore, in the short run these…efforts may instead weaken democracy by undermining voters’ trust in the political system and driving them toward extremist, authoritarian, or populist candidates and parties. Paradoxically, these negative short-term consequences may be more apparent where corruption and abuse are widespread—precisely where horizontal accountability is most needed (Meléndez-Sánchez 2021, 29).
I am far from the first to suggest that fighting corruption can inadvertently backfire on democracy (see, for example, Gonzalez-Ocantos et al. 2023; Mayka and Smith 2018; and Schwartz 2024). And I do not mean to imply that democrats should tolerate corruption. To the contrary, democrats should labor relentlessly to make institutions more accountable and more transparent—but they must find ways of doing so sustainably, without inadvertently undermining public faith in the entire system.
The second lesson concerns the relationship between hard-on-crime policies and democracy. As the New York Times quote above suggests, Bukele is often held up as an example of a purported tradeoff between democracy and security. Bukele, the argument goes, brought security to El Salvador thanks to the sheer scale and intensity of his gang crackdown. But a crackdown of such magnitude is incompatible with democracy because it requires the state to systematically violate civil liberties and because it leads to a dangerous concentration of power under the executive. As crime and insecurity soar in much of the region, the concern is that leaders elsewhere will declare Bukele-style crackdowns and, whether they mean to do so or not, destroy democracy in the process.
As Alberto Vergara and I show in our recent analysis of “the Bukele model,” there are several important problems with this line of reasoning (Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara 2024). One concerns the claim that Bukele’s crackdown succeeded because of its intensity. We argue that the crackdown’s success had less to do with its intensity and more to do with a preexisting pact between Bukele and the gangs: this pact, we suggest, left the gangs either unwilling or unable to fight back once Bukele declared war on them, providing an unusual—and hard to replicate—opportunity to defeat these criminal groups in one fell swoop.
Here, however, I wish to highlight a different issue: Bukele did not undermine democracy by declaring war on crime. On the contrary, Bukele destroyed democracy long before announcing his crackdown. As Vergara and I note, by the time Bukele launched the state of exception, he “had effectively captured, dismantled, or coopted all sources of horizontal accountability on the executive. The president, in other words, could rule alone” (Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara 2024, 89). And he did this largely without using insecurity as a pretext—it was not until the state of exception began that hard-on-crime, anti-gang rhetoric became a defining trait of his presidency (Meléndez-Sánchez, forthcoming).
This has an important implication: El Salvador does not prove that an aspiring autocrat can sink a democracy by declaring all-out war on crime, because this is not what happened in El Salvador. Indeed, those who have so far attempted to replicate (portions of) Bukele’s security policies in even minimally democratic contexts—see, for example, Xiomara Castro in Honduras and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador (Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara 2024, 92-95), or, more recently, Rodrigo Chaves in Costa Rica (Murillo 2025)—have found their efforts significantly limited by courts, constitutions, legislatures, and other sources of horizontal accountability. None of these leaders has been able to implement a crackdown even remotely comparable to Bukele’s—and democracy, though under significant stress in some of these cases, has so far survived their efforts to do so. If democracy does eventually fall in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, or elsewhere in the region, it seems likely that the pursuit of Bukele-style security policies would—at most—be only one of many contributing factors.
To be sure, this observation does not mean that democrats should stop being concerned about rising insecurity and its undemocratic remedies. But it should offer some hope: even in contexts of high levels of crime and violence, democracy may not be quite as brittle as common misinterpretations of the Salvadoran case would suggest.