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El Salvador's Beleauguered Democracy
Abstract
Salvadorans went to the polls on 2 February 2014 to select a new president. With current president Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) ineligible to run (El Salvador’s constitution prohibits consecutive presidential terms), voters were left to choose among Vice-President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN and former San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano of the National Republican Alliance (known as Arena). In an extremely close runoff on March 9, Sánchez Cerén managed to eke out a win against Quijano with 50.1 percent of the vote. The runoff results suggest that El Salvador still remains deeply divided two decades after the end of its civil war. Now Sánchez Cerén must govern a country beset by a feeble economy and rampant violence.
... Meanwhile, the former enemies ARENA and FMLN alternated in power of the presidency, and as the largest parties in the Parliament, after the 1994 election, two problems gradually developed: gang-related crime and corruption (Colburn, 2009;Colburn, Cruz, 2014;Meléndez-Sánchez, 2021;Wolf, 2009). Both the parties were to blame for this development, and neither of them tried to tackle the issues. ...
This article is about Nayib Bukele’s presidency in El Salvador, and to what extent it is a case of populism, and if it has contributed to a negative democratic development between 2019–2021. By using the concepts of democratic backsliding, autocratization, and populism, three main conclusions are made. First, actions taken by Bukele during his presidency has directly contributed to a negative democratic development. Second, both during the electoral campaign and in office, there are also signs of populism, such as anti-pluralism, hijacking the state, mass clientelism, and a feeling of a less democratic civil society and free media. Consequently, Bukele has pushed the country into a process of autocratization, where the future destiny toward less democracy is still uncertain.
... 3 On Venezuela's contribution to the FMLN, see Lemus (2014Lemus ( , 2016. 4 Positive assessments of the FMLN in government include Cannon and Hume (2012), Clark (2015) and Perla and Cruz-Feliciano (2013). Less positive assessments include Colburn and Cruz (2014), Réserve (2012Réserve ( , 2016 ...
El Salvador’s FMLN is an oft-cited example of a rebel movement which successfully embraced electoral democracy. This article examines the ideological dimensions of this transformation. In the course of the Salvadoran peace process, the FMLN substantially overhauled its ideological orientation and associated modes of engagement with the state and the broader political system. Moderation unfolded in four subsequent stages: the resignification of revolution as a process of reform, the FMLN’s rebel-to-party adaptation, the electoral consolidation of the FMLN, and the FMLN as the party in government. Over the years, while electoral politics invited public moderation, Leninist dogma continued to dominate internal party politics. This article finds that the post-war FMLN has employed seemingly contradictory ideological repertoires in parallel. This ambivalence, strongly rooted in the war, has facilitated the FMLN’s electoral ascendency. It has also strained democratic consolidation in El Salvador.
How does the presence of a large group of remittance recipients in the electorate affect the way political parties in Latin America plan their vote buying operations during electoral campaigns? Existing research claims that remittances bolster the political autonomy of recipients, allowing them to escape clientelistic networks and making them less attractive targets from the point of view of party machines. In this paper we argue that although in the long run remittances may undermine the effectiveness of clientelistic inducements, parties still have strong incentives to distribute gifts and favors among these voters. Cross national survey evidence as well as an original list experiment fielded in the aftermath of El Salvado r’s 2014 Presidential race support the view that remittances alter key attitudes and patterns of political behavior among recipients in ways that are relevant for the electoral strategies of party machines. In particular, remittance recipients are appealing targets for clientelistic exchanges due to the uncertainty of their turnout propensity and their distributive preferences.
On 15 March 2009, Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front (FMLN)–a former guerrilla movement that laid down its arms in 1992 and reconstituted itself as a political party–won the presidential election in El Salvador, marking the country's first peaceful turnover of power since the nation-state became independent in 1821. But sweeping social and political change will probably be elusive; instead, political and economic constraints are apt to lead to a surprising continuity in public policy.