February 4, 2024. Although the polling stations have just closed and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has not released results, Bukele has stepped out onto the balcony of the National Palace and, in his exaggerated and grandiloquent fashion, proclaimed himself the winner.

He enters the scene hand-in-hand with his wife, casual, in a khaki long-sleeved T-shirt. Ignoring, as he almost always does, any sense of proportion, he declares:

“El Salvador has broken all records.”

The central square of the capital is packed with hundreds of Salvadorans; some are dressed as Bukele, many carry vuvuzelas. Applause rumbles through the crowd, vuvuzelas blare.

“Today, El Salvador has broken every record, of every democracy, in the entire history of the world.”

The crowd chants: “Bu-ke-le, Bu-ke-le, Bu-ke-le!”

“Not only have we won the presidency of the Republic for a second time with more than 85 percent of the vote, but we have also won the Legislative Assembly with at least 58 of the 60 deputies.”

And the crowd chants: “Sí se pudo, sí se pudo!”

Numbers can deceive

Later, when the results became official, we’ll see that 56 percent of the electoral roll voted in that election, and that Bukele won with 82.66 percent of those votes. He also obtained an unquestionable majority: 54 of the 60 deputies.

The Salvadoran crowd does not know that in 1970s Mexico, José López Portillo, representing the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), won the presidency with 90 percent of the vote. Or that in 1928, in that same country, Álvaro Obregón obtained 100 percent. The crowd also disregards that, although under a different electoral system, in 1984 Ronald Reagan won the presidency of the United States with 97.6 percent of the electoral vote over his opponent and former vice president Walter Mondale; or that Franklin Roosevelt crushed Alfred Landon in 1936 with 98.5 percent of the vote. But what does it matter? Bukele has said what he has said—let the vuvuzelas sound. Denial can be positively jubilant.

“The first time that a country has a single party within a fully democratic system: the entire opposition has been pulverized.”

In choosing to ignore, the crowd forgets that in 1929 the president-elect of Mexico, Álvaro Obregón, was assassinated just one year after his victory, opening the door to the “perfect dictatorship”: the PRI. In choosing to ignore, the crowd forgets that when Portillo won with 90 percent of the vote, it was because there was no other candidate. They forget that when context is shed, numbers can deceive.

Bukele pauses deliberately, queuing the crowd applaud, to let the vuvuzelas sound, as if he were hosting a television show. The crowd is slow, at times, to understand these pauses and there is briefly silence. But the applause always comes.

Lie, decontextualized truth, lie

He launches into a recounting, worthy of an epic tale, of his path to dictatorship. In a speech like this, anything goes. Authoritarian force can be statesmanlike strategy.

“In 2019 we defeated the two-party system that had oppressed us. We turned over a new page, we put an end to the postwar period…”

It is true: Bukele destroyed presidential bipartisanship in 2019, through legitimate elections. Since the Peace Accords were signed in 1992, El Salvador had been governed only by the right, gathered under the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), or else by the left, monopolized by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Bukele obtained 1,434,856 votes; and his closest contender—a young Salvadoran millionaire from the right—received 857,054. In third place, far behind, was the former guerrilla fighter and former foreign minister Hugo Martínez, with 389,289 votes. Bukele has not only shattered a logic assumed for decades—that only ARENA or FMLN could win the presidency—he swept the field. On the night of that election, the FMLN headquarters were a wake, the mourners clad in the party’s red.

“…But we didn’t have governability. In 2021, you gave us a qualified majority in the Legislative Assembly, which allowed us—the people, together with their representatives—to remove the previous Constitutional Chamber, remove the previous attorney general, approve the Territorial Control Plan, and, in March 2022, approve the state of exception.”

Applause, vuvuzelas, the crowd again breaks into its chant: “Bu-ke-le, Bu-ke-le, Bu-ke-le!” A mother who has dressed her baby as Bukele lifts the child so a camera can capture it.

The last things Bukele said from the balcony of the National Palace were, in this order: truth, decontextualized truth, and lie.