El Salvador’s president has attained rockstar status on the global right. But don’t expect other countries to copy his policies.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is on a roll. At home, he enjoys an approval rating of around 83 percent, according to recent polls. His profile is rising abroad, too. Bukele’s follower count on TikTok alone—10.8 million—is much larger than El Salvador’s population, and a sizeable portion of his social media content is in English.
In the United States, right-wing figures appear to see Bukele as an inspiration—no small feat given El Salvador’s size. After Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. attended Bukele’s second-term inauguration last year, Carlson wrote on X that Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.” U.S. President Donald Trump treated Bukele as a close ally during the Salvadoran leader’s April visit to the White House, calling him “one hell of a president.”
Since Bukele first took office in 2019, he has turned El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas into one of its safest. El Salvador’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.9 per 100,000 people was lower than the United States’ rate in 2023, which was 6.8 per 100,000. But Bukele’s approach to reducing violent crime is controversial.
