Nayib Bukele claims landslide victory and says Spanish democracy is a colonial fraud in impassioned speech to supporters
Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s millennial president, attacked Spanish colonialism and imperialism in a fiery victory speech after he won a landslide victory.
Amid claims he is turning the country into a dictatorship, he boasted to flag-waving crowds below the presidential palace that El Salvador would be the first country with “a one-party system in a democracy”.
“The entire opposition together was pulverised,” Mr Bukele, who once styled himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, told the cheering masses.
The baseball cap-wearing Mr Bukele, 42, has become vastly popular for his war on gangs, but he has also been accused of stifling the courts and silencing opposition.
In his speech he said a Spanish journalist had recently asked him why he wants to dismantle democracy.
If people vote against their own interests, it is solely their fault, there is no way around it, deal with the consequences and do better next time. Saying that people must be protected against themselves means that you believe that your fellow human beings are inherently inferior to you and that they are not rational beings, akin to animals.
If you believe that you have intellectual superiority but you are not able to communicate that to your fellow countrymen, then you have failed thoroughly at being a politician, or you are not as superior as you think you are.