Nayib Bukele

Biography

Nayib Bukele was born in San Salvador in 1981, the son of a businessman of Palestinian Christian descent. He left law studies at the Central American University to work in advertising, founding the agency Obermet, which with his father's firm produced election campaigns for the left-wing FMLN.

He joined the FMLN in 2012 and was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, then won the mayoralty of San Salvador in 2015, where he restored the historic centre and invested in street lighting and youth scholarships. After repeated clashes with party leaders he was expelled from the FMLN in October 2017 and founded Nuevas Ideas. Unable to register the new party in time, he ran as the candidate of GANA and won the 2019 presidential election in the first round, the first president since 1989 from outside ARENA and the FMLN.

As president he launched the Territorial Control Plan against the gangs and, after a wave of killings in March 2022, a state of exception under which more than 85,000 people were arrested and El Salvador came to have the world's highest incarceration rate. Homicides fell sharply, while human rights groups documented arbitrary arrests and deaths in custody. In February 2020 he sent soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to press for a loan, in 2021 his allies replaced the constitutional judges and the attorney general, and the same year he made bitcoin legal tender.

A ruling by the new court allowed him to seek a consecutive term, and he won the 2024 election with about 85 percent of the vote. In 2025 the assembly abolished presidential term limits, and in 2026 Nuevas Ideas nominated him for a third term.