Elections in El Salvador - Why Salvadoreans love their populist president, Nayib Bukele | The Americas economist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from economist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nayib Bukele, Latin Americaâs youngest president, doesnât much like venturing into the street, or indigenous people, or wandering around markets, or being photographed with other peopleâs babies. The 39-year-old leader of El Salvador instead enjoys his cellphone, public image polls and âimplementing, implementing, implementing.â This has proven sufficient to sweep away three decades of bipartisanism and drastically transform the political landscape of a country still marked by the wounds of a bloody civil war (1980-1992) that ended when Bukele was barely 10.
In the view of his biographer and advisor, Geovani Galeas, Bukele is a multi-tasker capable of shaping the destiny of his people from the computer screens in his office, and is a leader with a political persona comparable to that of Fidel Castro or Mao Zedong. According to his former attorney and current political adversary Bertha Deleón, Bukele is âan adolescent with power, incapable of maintain