After a landslide victory in February, the 42-year-old is set to govern for another five years with near-total control of parliament and other state institutions.
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele will be sworn in for a second term, riding a wave of popularity that has helped him consolidate his power and influence in the country.
The 42-year-old, who unapologetically describes himself as a “quiet dictator,” was re-elected in February with 85 percent of the vote. He is scheduled to rule for another five years with almost total control of parliament and other state institutions.
The former publicist and mayor will be sworn in on Saturday at the National Palace in the capital, San Salvador.
The ceremony will be attended by dignitaries such as Spanish King Felipe VI and Argentine President Javier Milei, with whom Bukele shares admiration for former US President Donald Trump, whose son and namesake will also attend the event.
On Friday, preparations for the inauguration were disrupted by reports that police foiled a plot to detonate explosives at locations across the country.
Bukele enjoys sky-high approval ratings due to his brutal crackdown on criminal gangs, which is credited with returning a sense of normality to a violence-weary society.
The campaign has drawn criticism from human rights groups, but has made Bukele the most popular leader in Latin America, according to a regional poll.
Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party won an almost clean victory in the legislative elections, where it won 54 of 60 seats.
However, experts warn that his long honeymoon with voters may be coming to an end as economic concerns outweigh security concerns in public discourse, amid high government debt and rapidly rising the prices of consumer goods in a country where more than a quarter of the six million inhabitants live. in poverty.
Meanwhile, food inflation has outpaced wage increases, while public debt has soared during his tenure to more than $30 billion, or 84 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
Gangs as 'cancer'
Bukele will have even more power in his second term after the legislative assembly approved a reform that will make it easier for him to approve constitutional changes.
The president has laughed off criticism of authoritarian tendencies but was only able to seek re-election after a loyal Supreme Court ruling allowed him to sidestep a constitutional ban on successive terms.
“What he has shown is that the law is irrelevant and that he can do whatever he wants, however he wants,” public policy expert Carlos Carcach told AFP, calling Bukele an “all-powerful” president.
Wearing his preferred outfit of jeans and a baseball cap, the millennial Bukele came to power in 2019 promising to crush the country's gangs, to which he attributes some 120,000 murders in three decades, more than the 75,000 lives lost in the civil war in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992.
During Bukele's first term, authorities detained more than 80,000 suspected gangsters under a state of emergency in effect since March 2022 that allows arrest without a warrant.
His government also built the largest prison in Latin America to hold them.
The result, Bukele boasted, has been to turn “the world capital of murder, the most dangerous country in the world, into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.”
But this has come at a cost.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported murders and torture of detainees, and thousands of innocent people – including minors – among those arrested.
