El Salvador’s Strongman Is Set to Ride a Landslide Past Checks and Balances

El Salvador’s government has jailed thousands of innocent people, suspended key civil liberties indefinitely and flooded the streets with soldiers. Now the president overseeing it all, Nayib Bukele, is being accused of violating the constitution by seeking re-election.

And even his vice-presidential running mate admits their goal is “eliminating” what he sees as the broken democracy of the past.

But polls show most Salvadorans support Mr. Bukele, often not in spite of his strongman tactics — but because of them.

In elections on Sunday, voters are expected to hand Mr. Bukele and his New Ideas party a resounding victory, cementing the millennial president’s control over every branch of government.

The biggest reason, analysts say, is that the 42-year-old leader has achieved a seemingly impossible feat: decimating the vicious gangs that had turned El Salvador into one of the world’s most violent places.

“Some people call it a dictatorship,” said Sebastián Morales Rivera, a fisherman living in a former gang stronghold. “But I would prefer to live under the dictatorship of a man with a sound mind than under the dictatorship of a bunch of psychopathic maniacs.”