Pro President Of Bitcoin Nayib Bukele Returns To Election List El Salvador 2024

President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele (photo: twitter @nayibbukele)

JAKARTA - El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele, has submitted documents to run for re-election in the upcoming presidential election in February 2024.

Bukele, a Bitcoin supporter, received strong support from the public on October 26 after being officially nominated by his party for re-run.

"Five more, five more years and not a bit back," Bukele said in a speech in front of thousands of Salvadorans. "We need five more years to continue to improve our country," he added.

Bukele rose to power in 2019 when his political party, Neuva (New) Ideas, broke the dominance of two parties for three decades between the Alliance of Republicans and the Farabundo National Liberation Front Mart total (FMNLB).

El jueves fue un día histórico, fuimos a inscribirnos oficialmente para la candidatura a la Presidencia de la República de El Salvador 🇸🇻

Dios nos acompañe.

This Thursday was a historic day, as we went to officially register our candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic of… pic.twitter.com/tS2zfQz6Nl

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) October 28, 2023

However, despite being popular among local residents, critics such as El Salvador's lawyer, Alfonso Fajardo, argue that the state constitution prohibits Bukele from seeking a second term in a row.

"Today is the right day to remember that the presidential re-election is directly prohibited by 7 articles in the Constitution," he said on October 26.

However, in September 2021, the Supreme Court of El Salvador ruled that the president could run in sequential elections.

New Ideas is backed by 70% of the country's total voters, according to Reuters, citing a study by an El Salvadoran university. Its closest competitors received only 4% of the total votes.

One of the New Ideas competitors, FMNLB, filed a lawsuit in June 2021 stating that Bukele's Bitcoin adoption program was unconstitutional. However, the complaint came to fruition, as Bukele and El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender three months later, in September 2021.

The Bukele government has also implemented other technology-friendly policies aimed at strengthening the country's economy, such as eliminating all taxes on technological innovation.

Gabor Gurbacs, a strategist adviser at VanEck, recently said that El Salvador has the potential to become "Singapore in America."

Much of Bukele's popularity stems from his crackdown on MS-13, a cross-border gang that made El Salvador, the country that recorded the world's highest death rate six years ago.

As a result of this decisive action, El Salvador's death rate fell by 92.6% from its peak of 106 per 100,000 population in 2015 to 7.8 in 2022. Now the country has one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.

However, the United Nations and other critics argue that El Salvador violated human rights laws by imprisoning 65,000 people without giving them the legal right to defend themselves. El Salvador's presidential election will take place on February 4, 2024.