Incumbent presidential candidate Nayib Bukele has won a landslide victory in El Salvador in an election that was all but guaranteed thanks to his massive popularity and strategic consolidation of power. While an official vote count has not been released—the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal cites issues with the preliminary vote tally system—Bukele claimed he had won 83 percent of the vote against 7 percent for his nearest competitor. 

In a sly nod to mounting criticism against the erosion of human rights and democratic norms in Bukele’s El Salvador, the president and his wife cast their ballots to the tune of R.E.M’s hit song “It’s the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine).” He later appeared on the presidential balcony playing the same song and announced: “Today, El Salvador has broken all the records of all democracies in the history of the world.” Bukele is the country’s first reelected president, after a Supreme Court stacked in his favor allowed him to bypass a constitutional ban on reelection. 

“It will be the first time in a country that just one party exists in a completely democratic system,” Bukele told thousands of cheering supporters on election night, adding that “the entire opposition together was pulverized.” Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party also swept the Legislative Assembly, where it will hold as many as 58 out of 60 seats, Bukele has claimed, despite final results not yet being available. This will give Bukele free reign to continue his ongoing state of emergency, which has been in place for nearly two years and imprisoned over 70,000 people. 

Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the country’s human rights crisis may deepen under a second Bukele term. “The international community must stay vigilant and use all resources and mechanisms at its disposal to halt and reverse the abuses and state violence that are jeopardizing human rights in El Salvador,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International. She added that his administration has “repeatedly concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarized public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country, with a disproportionate effect on people living in poverty.”

The Bukele model has become a beacon of the Latin American new right, with Argentina’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich saying this week to Infobae that “we are interested in adapting the Bukele model.” In an editorial, El Pais warned against the dangers of exporting Bukele’s authoritarian tactics. “It is an attractive and easy rhetoric, which offers a supposedly quick solution to one of the continent’s greatest scourges, although in reality it neither ends the problems of misery and lack of opportunities that are at the origin of crime, nor are its methods acceptable to a democracy unless one is willing to enter a permanent state of emergency.” 

For more, check out this week’s special edition of NACLA’s podcast Under the Shadow, produced in partnership with The Real News Network. Host Michael Fox reports from El Salvador and breaks down the election in conversation with Central American Studies scholar and NACLA Editorial Committee member Jorge Cuéllar.