“If a leader doesn’t change the rules, he can’t fix the system.” — Nayib Bukele, 2018
There is nothing new about a young man with ambition, or even a rich one who wants to "give back." What is rare, and far more dangerous, is a man who learns early that affection can be bought, loyalty manufactured, and truth made elastic. Before Nayib Bukele ever draped himself in presidential sashes, he was already rehearsing power. Just not the kind you get from votes. The kind you get from controlling the story.
His rise wasn’t meteoric. It was engineered. And the illusion was not just that he represented something different, but that he believed in anything at all.
Born in 1981, Nayib Bukele entered the world on the edge of a nation ripping itself apart. El Salvador’s civil war was just beginning, and while tens of thousands would die over the next decade, Bukele’s childhood was sheltered from the bloodshed. His father, Armando Bukele Kattán, was a businessman, imam, and polymath who built a fortune through media, advertising, and printing ventures. The Bukeles were not merely well-off; they were part of the country’s rarefied elite. Above the common people – Cosmopolitan, connected, and comfortably above the fray.
That distance from violence may explain part of Nayib’s political detachment. He didn’t grow up with the ideological scars that defined the older generation. No allegiance to the guerrilla struggle or military counterinsurgency. His upbringing was not marked by factionalism, but by marketing. He learned not how to fight for causes, but how to sell them. His first steps into professional life weren’t as a community organizer or political theorist. He was a college dropout who turned his attention to branding. It’s there where the true foundation of Bukele’s politics was laid.
In 2006, Bukele took over as director of Obermet S.A. de C.V., an advertising and communications firm founded by his father. Under Nayib’s leadership, the company pivoted from basic print media into sleek, full-service brand strategy. Obermet’s clients included major companies in energy, finance, and telecommunications, but more significantly, it became a quiet fixture in Salvadoran political messaging. When the FMLN sought to modernize its image ahead of the 2009 presidential campaign, they turned to Obermet. Bukele, then in his late twenties, helped craft the image of Mauricio Funes — a former CNN journalist turned candidate — as a man of the people.
Obermet produced ads that were emotive, high contrast, and focused more on identity than substance. Bukele didn’t write policy. He designed feelings. He understood early that Salvadorans, who were disillusioned by decades of corruption and violence, weren’t looking for ideology. They were looking for someone to believe in. His job was to create that belief, whether or not it was true. He was, in the purest sense, an architect of illusion.
This period taught him more than any political apprenticeship could. He learned the anatomy of public perception. He learned how to flatten complex issues into digestible slogans, how to manipulate color and light to shape emotional response, how to bury criticism in noise, and how to use emerging platforms like Facebook and Twitter to bypass media gatekeepers altogether. Obermet wasn’t just his business. It was his laboratory.
It also made him cynical. Branding teaches that everything is flexible. Names, values, loyalties, all fair game, so long as the narrative works. Bukele saw firsthand how easily Salvadoran politicians could be rebranded, how the same hands that waved revolutionary flags in the ’90s could now shake those of businessmen and oligarchs, so long as the messaging matched the moment. This convinced him that ideology was performative, and that success didn’t require belief, only consistency in image.
So when he launched his own political career as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012, he brought with him the tools of the trade. Campaign posters looked like Apple product launches. Videos were tightly edited, background music swelled emotionally, and every speech was choreographed to feel spontaneous. His social media presence wasn’t just strong; it was surgical. Followers received a carefully maintained illusion of access, humor, and relatability. He wasn’t selling policies. He was selling a personality.
And Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small suburb of fewer than 10,000 residents, provided the perfect test market. Here, his background in ad psychology and image control gave him an overwhelming advantage. He promised transparency, progress, and a break from traditional politics. With the town being so small, the spectacle itself could substitute for substance. Few cared whether the reforms were deep. They looked different, and that was enough.
Bukele had found his method: emotional storytelling, weaponized aesthetics, and the erasure of ideology in favor of identity. Politics, to him, was not a calling. It was a product. And like any good ad man, he would spend the rest of his career making sure people kept buying it.
When Nayib Bukele was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012, it was not a major political victory. It was a strategic rehearsal. The town, with a population of fewer than 10,000 at the time, sits just outside San Salvador’s urban sprawl, quiet, small, and easy to control. For a man without governing experience but with a background in advertising, it offered a blank slate. Not to test policy, but to craft narrative. Bukele’s time as mayor was not a political awakening. It was a branding exercise.
One of the more famous products of this phase was his scholarship program. Launched early in his term, the initiative covered tuition and expenses for low-income students to attend university. The program was, on the surface, progressive and deeply humanistic: a young mayor lifting the poor through education. He made sure the cameras were there when families received the news. Testimonials followed. Social media was flooded with smiling students and grateful parents, all thanking one man. Not the government. Nayib.
But as with much in Bukele’s career, the gesture was louder than the substance. The scholarship program was limited in scale and scope, benefiting fewer than 100 students in a municipality with thousands living under the poverty line. It lacked oversight, formal evaluation, or integration with national education policy. It was disconnected from structural improvements. There was no investment in public schools, no teacher training, no curriculum reform. This hasn’t changed, even with Bukele’s complete control over the political system. Education wasn’t being transformed. The message was.
Nayib Bukele with his partner in November 2012 at Cuscatlán Stadium, during
the presentation of Salvador Sáchez Cerén as a candidate for the presidency
of El Salvador. Photo The Lighthouse/Mauro Arias
Bukele’s philanthropy wasn’t systemic. It was personal, and that was the point. The mayor's office was turned into a kind of patronage machine. Residents began to associate access to services with loyalty to the figure of Bukele himself, rather than with institutions or civic processes. He had no party machinery to rely on and didn’t need one. What he created instead was a form of political dependence. Gratitude became political currency. Visibility became proof of virtue.
This approach echoed familiar tactics from Latin American strongmen throughout history, but it was especially reminiscent of the methods used by Pablo Escobar in Colombia. Escobar, the infamous drug lord, also paid for scholarships, built soccer fields, funded housing projects, all with the explicit aim of manufacturing goodwill among the poor. He didn’t need to change the system. He just needed to make people believe he was their only hope. Bukele, while not a criminal, operated on a strikingly similar logic. He didn’t reform the state; he replaced it with his image.
Other policies during his mayoral term followed this same template: symbolic, isolated, and designed for maximum visual impact. He planted trees and opened a small library—photographed, of course, in high definition. He boasted about modernizing the town with LED lighting and surveillance cameras, signaling an interest in “smart city” aesthetics that would later metastasize into full-blown digital authoritarianism. Meanwhile, critics noted that public works tended to benefit specific neighborhoods tied to his support base, while others languished.
Despite projecting an image of youthful transparency, Bukele governed Nuevo Cuscatlán with tight control. Public records were sparse, budgets were often opaque, and his relationship with the city council was marked by unilateralism. He rarely engaged in debate or consensus-building; instead, decisions were announced through social media as if they had already happened. His administration wasn’t participatory. It was performative. He didn’t practice politics. He curated it.
All of this helped develop the most important narrative in his eventual national rise: Bukele as the benevolent outsider, the good king who delivers when the republic fails. But behind the carefully chosen hashtags and photo ops, the foundation was already being laid for a political model that substituted loyalty for law and spectacle for policy. Nuevo Cuscatlán was not a success story in governance. It was a proof-of-concept for control.
It worked. By the end of his term, Bukele had a cultlike following in the town, with many residents openly declaring they would support him no matter what office he sought next. That loyalty had nothing to do with ideology or party. It was personal, emotional, and uncritical. And it was entirely by design.
Nayib Bukele often speaks as if he emerged from nothing. No ideology, no party, no past. But this is not quite true. His rise was incubated by the Salvadoran left. It was the FMLN. Born from the guerrilla movements of the civil war that gave him his first mayoral post and platform. They handed him a flag, a voter base, and a lineage of struggle to drape around himself. And in return, he gave them what he gives most alliances: a smile, a speech, and eventually, a knife.
The FMLN’s decision to back Bukele in 2012 was more desperation than inspiration. After years of internal fracturing, generational fatigue, and the political compromises of governance, the party had lost its revolutionary glow. It needed a facelift. Bukele was young, wealthy, photogenic, and media-savvy. He was an opportunity. He could attract voters the old guard never could. What they didn’t realize was that he wasn’t trying to reform the party from within. Bukele was borrowing it, briefly, to enter the room. Then he would burn it behind him.
From the start, his relationship with the FMLN was more parasitic than principled. He rarely participated in internal meetings, ignored party discipline, and openly criticized leadership while still wearing the party’s colors. His campaigns were personalist, not ideological. His face dwarfed the FMLN logo on posters. His social media presence focused almost exclusively on himself. In a movement that once prided itself on collective struggle, Bukele made it all about one man. And he sold the narrative brilliantly.
The left, too fractured and nostalgic to recognize the threat, let it happen. They tolerated his transgressions in the name of electability. But Bukele wasn’t building a bridge for the FMLN to the next generation, he was building an exit for himself. In 2017, the party finally expelled him after he insulted a city councilwoman and repeatedly violated internal codes. Bukele, true to form, painted himself as a victim. He claimed the party had abandoned its values. In reality, he had never held them.
His expulsion was not a moment of political rebirth. It was a moment of political liberation. Without the burden of ideology or party hierarchy, Bukele was free to recast himself entirely. He declared himself the only “real” anti-corruption candidate, launched Nuevas Ideas, and began railing against the very leftist movement that had elevated him. His language morphed from social justice to “cleaning house,” from class struggle to populist rage. The revolution was rebranded, hollowed out, and sold back to the public with better lighting.
His betrayal of the left was not ideological, it was aesthetic. Bukele understood that in a country exhausted by polarization, ideology was a liability. People didn’t want theory; they wanted action, or at least the appearance of it. They wanted someone who looked like he had answers. So Bukele gave them performance: jackets instead of suits, iPads instead of briefings, tweets instead of press conferences. And in doing so, he made both left and right obsolete.
But the left was the first to collapse. It had spent years in power compromising with neoliberal policy, failing to hold its own accountable, and losing the moral clarity that had once made it a symbol of resistance. When Bukele arrived, it saw in him not a threat, but a chance. That mistake cost them everything. His movement cannibalized the very voters the FMLN once mobilized, the young, urban, disillusioned, and poor. And it did so by offering not ideology, but vengeance.
He never needed to beat the left in debate. He only needed to wear its face long enough to discredit it. What remains now of El Salvador’s left is a husk. Distrusted, scattered, they are unable to reclaim the narrative. Bukele stole its language, turned its grievances into his slogans, and then used his power to erase the memory of what that movement once stood for.
The tragedy is not just that Bukele abandoned the left. It’s that the left, in its desperation, handed him the keys.
When Nayib Bukele launched Nuevas Ideas in 2018, he was not offering a political alternative. He was offering an exorcism. The party (if one can even call it that) did not emerge from a collective platform, grassroots pressure, or ideological necessity. It emerged from a single premise: that all existing parties were irredeemably corrupt, and only Bukele could fix them. He was no longer merely the candidate. He was now the movement.
The name itself, “New Ideas”, was vague by design. It promised transformation without specifying direction. Was it left? Right? Reformist? Revolutionary? It didn’t matter. In a country where faith in political institutions had collapsed, ambiguity was a feature, not a bug. Bukele’s message was simple: trust me, not the system. And people did. Within months, Nuevas Ideas gathered over 200,000 signatures, an unprecedented surge in a nation known for apathy. But what those supporters signed onto wasn’t a platform. It was a personality cult with a blue checkmark.
This was the moment Bukele transcended traditional politics. He had already worn the left like a mask and abandoned it. Now he would transcend the party system itself. He told supporters that Nuevas Ideas would be a citizen-led movement, untainted by ideology. He branded himself as a post-political savior, the rare leader unowned by history. But that narrative collapsed almost immediately when, due to bureaucratic timing, Nuevas Ideas couldn’t register in time for the 2019 elections. Bukele needed a party. Fast.
He found one in GANA, the Grand Alliance for National Unity, is a center-right party founded by defectors from ARENA, the very party once associated with death squads, corporate impunity, and military dictatorship. It was, in many ways, the embodiment of everything Bukele claimed to oppose. And yet, with no hesitation, he accepted their platform as a temporary host. Once again, principle was irrelevant. The move wasn’t ideological. It was parasitic.
GANA, desperate for relevance, handed Bukele the nomination without a primary. In doing so, they ceased to be a party and became a shell, a legal vehicle for a man who had no use for their history or their beliefs. With their history being one of dictators and oppression, however, strongman Bukele respects their history by disrespecting it, and taking it for himself.
The irony was staggering: Bukele had gone from leftist reformer to right-wing opportunist in a matter of months. But his followers didn’t flinch. He told them it was just a technicality. The end justifies the means. The same narrative Escobar once used when running for office as an “independent reformer” while bankrolling old guard politicians.
With GANA’s ballot line and Nuevas Ideas’ mythos, Bukele ran—and won. In doing so, he proved something more dangerous than the power of populism. He proved that in a country exhausted by betrayal, identity could be erased and rewritten at will. That truth didn’t matter if it came with good lighting. That if you destroyed enough bridges behind you, people would forget there was ever a path to begin with.
Nuevas Ideas soon absorbed the state like fog rolling in. It functioned less like a party and more like an app; slick, efficient, centralized. Internal democracy was nonexistent. Dissenters were purged, candidates were handpicked, and Bukele’s family and inner circle consolidated control behind the scenes. The party's candidates were mostly unknowns, loyalists, influencers, or bureaucrats selected for obedience over vision. Once in the Assembly, they passed laws like users accepting terms of service: instantly, without question.
The myth of political independence became a mask for absolute control. Bukele wasn’t building a new democracy. He was building a new loyalty machine. The party was not a platform. It was a spotlight. It didn’t carry a worldview. It carried a man. Every function, every speech, every campaign image revolved around his personal mythology: the president in a backwards cap, the rebel in the palace, the savior with no past.
And like every strongman before him, Bukele claimed that he had been forced to break the rules because the rules were broken. That Nuevas Ideas was the only possible future for a country at war with its past. That ideology is obsolete, and that the people should vote not for policies, but for purity.
It worked. But the implications are chilling. A nation desperate for change handed its institutions to a man who promised everything and defined nothing. A party that claimed to be new became the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: the illusion of choice under the shadow of one man’s design.
By the time Nayib Bukele stepped into the presidential palace in 2019, it was no longer clear whether he was a politician or an actor playing one. His campaign had never really been about policy, nor even about ideology, it was about mood. Aesthetics. Storytelling. He wasn’t elected to govern; he was elected to perform. And the stage had been set perfectly.
Bukele understood early on that Salvadoran politics was not a contest of plans, but of narratives. In a country where both the left and right had burned through their moral capital; embroiled in scandals, corruption, and hypocrisy, truth had become secondary to the feeling of truth. And Bukele, with a decade in advertising and a career spent controlling optics, knew exactly how to produce that feeling.
His greatest political skill isn’t rhetoric, it’s editing. He curated his persona the way one curates a brand: the backwards snapback, the leather jacket, the staged visits to crime-ridden neighborhoods flanked by cameras and drones. His speeches were short, often streamed directly on Facebook Live, designed less to inform and more to be shared. Even his silences were strategic. He rarely submitted to interviews, preferring instead to speak unfiltered to the public through his tightly managed social media accounts; where criticism was often deleted, blocked, or drowned under waves of fan replies. He didn’t need journalists. He had followers.
This was not democracy in any meaningful sense. It was image management. And Bukele was its central product.
From his time as mayor, he treated public office as a stage set. He announced infrastructure projects with cinematographic flair and often without legislative approval. He installed LED light shows in San Salvador, declared “smart city” initiatives, and posed with garbage trucks like a campaign model. In Nuevo Cuscatlán, his first mayorship, his administration emphasized beautification, public art, and selective social spending like student scholarships. Programs that looked good on camera and earned applause, even as more structural reforms remained elusive.
And just like the narco barons who handed out housing in exchange for silence, Bukele's generosity came with strings: loyalty, optics, and erasure of dissent. His projects were not built for permanence; they were built for applause. When policy clashed with spectacle, spectacle always won.
In this new model of governance, traditional markers of credibility: Experience, institutional backing, and ideological consistency, no longer mattered. Bukele’s entire rise was predicated on rejecting those values. He did not care to debate his opponents; he discredited them. He did not build coalitions; he overwhelmed them. And rather than present a coherent agenda, he offered a singular, intoxicating message: trust me.
What followed was not a campaign, but a movement of projection. Supporters saw in him whatever they wanted to see: a rebel, a technocrat, a nationalist, a reformer, a messiah. He never contradicted them. Instead, he floated above the contradictions. A man of the left who ran with the right. A critic of caudillismo who tweeted like a generalissimo. An anti-corruption crusader who never explained his own opaque financing. Each paradox became part of the myth. Bukele was the mirror, not the image.
And so, on June 1, 2019, as he stood with his trademark smirk and took the presidential oath, there was no doubt whose victory it was. Not the people’s, not Nuevas Ideas’, but his alone. He had maneuvered through three parties, discarded ideology like old clothes, and emerged with near-total control of the national narrative. He had entered office not as the leader of a republic, but as the protagonist of a story only he could write and only he was allowed to end.
What would come next could not be predicted by party platforms or policy papers. Bukele had left all that behind. What came next would be something else entirely.