El Salvador Perspectives

Two opinion polls released in June show president Nayib Bukele continuing to receive high approval ratings from large swaths of the Salvadoran public.  A poll released by La Prensa Grafica , one of the country's major newspapers, reported that 85.2% of the public approve of Bukele's performance in office after six years in the presidency.  A second poll released by the Institute of Public Opinion at the UCA reported that respondents gave  him an average grade of 8.15 on a 0-10 scale for his presidency. Bukele's ratings have ranged between 8.7 and 8.15 in the last 5 years of polls by the UCA. These  latest polls are consistent, and not surprising, in finding that respondents praise the improved public security situation as Bukele's greatest achievement, and point to economic issues as his biggest challenge. The Legislative Assembly and local municipal governments, however, had approval ratings quite a bit below the ratings of Bukele, despite being controlled almost e...

Recent polling by Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador released this week offers insights into two areas -- how Salvadorans view religious faith and how they view Nayib Bukele's recent decision to promote gold mining in El Salvador. Salvadorans continue to be religious by nature and believers in the Christian god: 17.39% of those polled considered themselves "very religious" 78.12% consider themselves believers 2.86% agnostic 1.63% atheist However the make-up of church affiliation continues to evolve, as the Roman Catholic church continues to lose adherents: 47.02% declared belonging to protestant/evangelical churches 36.82% to the Catholic church 12.98% do not belong to any denomination 1.55% are in a non-Christian religion.  Review the full poll results to see a wide variety of polling questions about how religious faith influences beliefs about knowledge, science and morality.  The poll did not, however, test Salvadorans' acceptance of the regular asserti...

Recent year-end polling by the Public Opinion Institute at the University of Central America reveals that the economy is now viewed by the overwhelming majority of Salvadorans as the principal problem confronting their country.  The poll was conducted from December 5-17, 2024 involving more than 1200 persons from every department in the country. According to the poll results released by IUDOP,  76% of Salvadorans now believe the economy is the biggest problem the government must tackle, up from 70% a year ago, and 63% at the end of 2022.   As is true in many places, Salvadorans are focused on inflation, with 54% believing prices have gone up "mucho." How much do you perceive that the cost of living  has increased in El Salvador? In contrast to years before 2020, when crime and insecurity was seen by persons polled as the leading crisis or a major problem in the country, today less than 2% of Salvadorans believe that crime is the principal challenge facing the c...

September 2023 parade in Tonacatepeque I do not often write in the first person in this space, but as I develop this series of posts at the start of the third year of the State of Exception, it feels important to describe how I have seen El Salvador change during that time. I have spent more than twenty years visiting and getting to know well a small community in the municipality of Tonacatepeque, northeast of San Salvador.  This collection of small houses, with water which arrives some of the days, with chickens and dogs and small children roaming the streets, is dear to me. And for most of the time I have known it, the community has been under control of the MS-13 gang. Two years into the State of Exception, the "muchachos" are no longer present, and the difference it makes in people's lives is real and observable. Residents now cross gang boundaries from one territory to another, no longer fearing deadly retribution as a consequence.  New little businesses have opened ...

On Sunday March 3, Salvadorans will go to the polls for the second set of national elections in a month.   In these elections, Salvadorans will elect their mayors and will elect deputies of the Central American Parliament.  (PARLACEN). Three years ago Salvadorans elected mayors in 262 different municipalities.  However, in a measure passed 8 months ago, the Legislative Assembly consolidated those 262 municipalities into only 44 municipalities at the directive of Nayib Bukele.  The old municipalities are now "districts" within the 44 new mega-municipalities which have memorable names like San Salvador East and La Libertad South.   The new municipalities and the districts which make them up are shown at this link .   This reduction in the number of local government bodies was gerrymandering on a dramatic scale.   One analyst portrayed the impact of the change using results from the last elections in 2021. Using the votes cast for may...

A new poll released by Francisco Gavidia University (UFG) shows the possibility, that after national elections in February 2024, Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas party will have firmly consolidated one party rule over all of the Salvadoran government. There is no surprise that Nayib Bukele has an overwhelming lead in his campaign to be re-elected president for a second five year term. The highly popular Bukele is preferred by more than 68% of respondents, while no other party's candidate reaches even 5%.   These results appear despite the fact that El Salvador's constitution states multiple times that a president may not be re-elected for successive terms. (See those provisions at the bottom of this post).  However, a panel of Bukele allied judges, installed in the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court by Nuevas Ideas in 2021, decided those provisions should be ignored and issued a ruling that Bukele should be permitted to run again.  ...

The government of El Salvador released at the end of March its annual Multi-purpose Household Survey ("EHPM" for its initials in Spanish) for 2022.   Here are some of the statistics contained in this year's report regarding the people of El Salvador.  According to the estimates in the 2022 EHPM, the population of the country is 6.33 million people:   53.3% of the population is female 61.7% of the population lives in urban areas 30.7% of the population is younger than 20 27.4% of the population lives in the department of San Salvador 24.7% of young people between the ages of 15-29 are not in school or employed. The percentage of the population living in poverty in 2022 was 26.6%, while the percentage living in extreme poverty was 8.6%.  This was an increase in poverty rates compared to 2021, and was primarily due to inflation increasing the cost of that basic basket of goods which defines the poverty level in the country while household earnings were n...

How does the Salvadoran public feel about the country and its challenges at the beginning of 2023?  As part of our series on the current state of El Salvador in several areas, today we look at public opinion.  Recent polls taken in December 2022 and released by long-standing credible polling organizations -- LPG Datos and the University Institute of Public Opinion at the UCA -- give important insights into the mood of the public.   A quick summary -- the public strongly approves of what president Nayib Bukele has accomplished to address gang violence and crime, and now the public's biggest worry is the economy and inflation.  IUDOP -- poll results published here . LPG -- poll results published here in series of articles between December 13-15, 2022. To start with, 80% of Salvadorans say the country was better off in 2022 than in 2021 (IUDOP) The economy is the biggest problem . 63.4% of those polled said economy was the biggest problem compared to only 19....

Two Salvadoran universities released poll results May 25 providing the opinions of the Salvadoran public regarding the current State of Exception and other aspects of the government of president Nayib Bukele.   Despite the warnings of human rights advocates and independent journalists regarding arbitrary detentions, the abuse of human rights, and the decline of the rule of law in the country, it would be fair to say that the Salvadoran public is quite satisfied with the current performance of the government.   The University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP) of the UCA conducted a poll to learn public sentiment surrounding the State of Exception and the accompanying roundup of more than 34,000 suspected gang members and collaborators.  The IUDOP poll results  show the Salvadoran public to be broadly supportive of those measures.  According to the poll:   89.2% believe the State of Exception has been useful in reducing the level of crime in ...

The State of Exception in El Salvador, which suspends a set of set of constitutional guarantees is now concluding its 8th week.  A  CID-Gallup poll  in mid-April found that 91% of Salvadorans support the current gang crackdown.     The government says that more than 32,500 suspected gang members have been arrested. Meanwhile some legislative deputies from Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party have suggested that the State of Exception will need to be extended for 30 more days after it expires next week, despite the fact that homicides in the country have been at record low levels for almost the entire past seven weeks.  In other words, it is not clear that the country faces an ongoing crisis situation of the type that justifies suspending important constitutional rights.   The human rights organization Cristosal states that it has recorded 555 cases of violations of human rights in the 8 weeks that the State of Exception has been in force in El Salva...

In recent weeks, two sets of researchers have released polling data about perceptions of democracy and government in El Salvador and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.  The results of those surveys show that Salvadorans strongly support a democracy that produced Nayib Bukele as their president, but also support encroachments on democratic values if initiated by the president. AmericasBarometer is a survey of populations in Latin American and the Caribbean carried out by LAPOP Lab, an international survey research center based at Vanderbilt University.  That poll showed that Salvadorans have some of the strongest support for democracy in the region, when asked about that concept in the abstract.  Salvadorans were asked: "Democracy may have problems, but it is better than any other form of government." To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? 73% of those polled agreed, which was a significant increase from 59% in 2018 66% say they t...

How do you maintain your image as the most popular president doing the coolest things in the world? For Nayib Bukele, that means having a public relations media machine which knows all the tricks in the book. Today I present a case study of one instance earlier this year, where public opinion polling of dubious quality was broadcast far and wide as "real news." On October 4, 2021, news pieces began circulating which announced that the Salvadoran diaspora in the US overwhelmingly supported the re-election of Nayib Bukele as president.  The poll was authored by the Center of Investigations Social and Economic Studies of Central America (CIESCA) and found that 99% of those polled favored a second term for Bukele and 96% agreed that Bitcoin would improve El Salvador's economy.  Soon the results had been shared broadly. The full document can be found here .         A poll which was dubious on its face. The CIESCA poll results, presented in a meeting room...

The Institute for Public Opinion at the University of Central America released results of polling done in August regarding the current situation in El Salvador.  You can find the full report here . Here are some points of interest: Nayib Bukele still has a high job approval rating (7.64 out of 10), although the IUDOP says this is the lowest rating he has held during his term in office. The Legislative Assembly also gets a passing grade (6.27  out of 10), although those polled do believe that the deputies in the Assembly work more for their political party than the good of the people. The principal problems people see confronting the country are: Crime / insecurity   21.8% Economy   19.5% The COVID-19 pandemic  16.9% Unemployment    12.7% Poverty    7.2% High cost of living    4% Bad government policy    3.5% Violence    2.7% Gangs    2.6% Corruption    2% Politics / politicians / par...

After two years in office, Nayib Bukele remains a highly popular president with impressive approval ratings.  These are the results of an opinion poll released yesterday by La Prensa Grafica, a periodical which itself is not an ally of the president.  According to the poll, 86.5% approve of Bukele's performance in office, with 63.6% greatly approving: Bukele receives even higher marks, above 90%, for his management of the pandemic, and there is no sign that the May 1 removal of supreme court judges and the attorney general, widely criticized internationally and by constitutional experts, had any negative impact on Bukele's image among his supporters.  Bukele's approval ratings are significantly higher than his previous three predecessors in office at the same point in their presidencies: Equally important, more Salvadorans believe that El Salvador is on the correct course forward than not: Last night Bukele delivered a " Discourse to the Nation " on the...

Since today is the final day under Salvadoran law that pre-election poll results may be publicized, here are links to several recent polls.  In general, all show support for Nuevas Ideas exceeding 60-70% in the Legislative Assembly races, and smaller, but still strong leads, in the number of mayor's offices the party may capture including San Salvador.  Other parties rarely climb out of single digits.   University of Central America IUDOP University Francisco Gavidia Technological University of El Salvador (UTEC) FundaUngo CID-Gallup And here's a collection of polls on Nayib Bukele's strong approval ratings .

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is extraordinarily popular according to all recent public opinion polling.  In fact, in poll results published in July 2020, the Mexican Mitofsky polling firm shows Bukele having the highest approval rating among world heads of state , with an approval rating of 84%. (This is not the first time a Salvadoran president has led the world in Mitofsky poll approval ratings, Mauricio Funes also enjoyed an 84% approval rating and now is is a fugitive from corruption charges living in Nicaragua).  Nothing in the news seems to pull Bukele's ratings lower.     A May 2020 poll  by La Prensa Grafica showed Bukele with an approval rating among Salvadorans of 92.5%. A public opinion poll  from the University of Central America on the one year anniversary of Bukele's presidency gave him ratings of 7.7 out of 10 in general and with regards to his handling of the pandemic.   In that same UCA poll, 65.7% o...