El Salvador presidential power grab

This past Saturday, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, used the first session of the new legislative assembly, dominated by his party, to dismiss five members of the Constitutional Court and the Attorney General. There was no pretense of following constitutional procedures. It is a pure power grab and probably qualifies as an autogolpe.

If you read Spanish, this story in El Faro is a good place to start. If not, there is an El Faro English summary. Also at El Faro (and in English) is an excellent piece from February about how we got here–Oscar Pocasangre writes about how the country’s party system was collapsing. He blames this collapse in part on the corruption in both established parties (ARENA and FMLN, representing opposing sides from the former civil war) and also the changes of the electoral system to open-list and now free-list PR.

For years I have followed Salvadoran electoral and party politics closely, including at this blog. I often noted how rigid the party system had become. In recent years, the rigidity had begun to erode, and I remarked on that at times. But it was indeed clear once Bukele was elected that it was on the brink of a complete shakeup, if not breakdown. For the past year or more, I have been worried the breaking down of the party system might take democracy down with it. Has it now? This is an alarming development.

El Salvador presidency 2019–a president from a different party?

El Salvador holds the first round of its presidential election today. If no candidate obtains more than half the votes, a runoff between the top two will be held on 10 March. El Salvador holds nonconcurrent elections (usually), with the presidency elected for five years and legislative assembly for three. The expected winner of the presidency comes from one of the smaller parties, the optimistically named Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA). Given that there will not be a new assembly election till 2021, the new president may have some difficulties governing. While no president has had his party in a majority in the assembly since the 1980s (before the settlement of the civil war), all presidents since the mid-1990s have come from either the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) or the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN). Thus El Salvador may be entering a new political era.

It might be misleading to call the expected winner an “outsider”, as Reuters did. Not only is Nayib Bukele the candidate of one of the existing (smaller) parties, but also he is the mayor of San Salvador, which would be considered the second most powerful and visible elected post in the country. He was originally elected mayor as the FMLN candidate, but was expelled from the party. He joined GANA to bolster his presidential ambitions. So some degree of “outsiderness”, perhaps, but it is not as if he’s not held important office before or is running on his own campaign vehicle apart from the party system. (The Wikipedia article says he tried to register a new party but was barred from doing so.)

So what about GANA, the likely next president’s adopted party? The most recent assembly election was in 2018, and GANA won only 10 of the 84 seats, although its 11.5% of the vote was its highest to date. GANA resulted from a split from the ARENA, which occurred after the FMLN won the presidency for the first time in 2009. It remains an essentially right-wing party, and I wish I knew more about the policymaking process under two FMLN presidencies to know what sorts of policy compromises the formerly radical-guerrilla left and a right-wing splinter made. Whatever their alliance might look like in substantive terms, it was strong enough politically that GANA did not even put up a presidential candidate in 2014.

In the 2018 election, the parties of the ruling alliance (FMLN and GANA) lost seats, as is entirely predictable from a late-term election. Thus President Salvador Sánchez Cerén has spent the past year of his term in quite a lame-duck situation, with his own party having only 21.4% of the seats and the erstwhile ally with another 11.9%. I say “erstwhile” because, while I do no know what, if any, legislative alliances the president has been working with in the last year, it is evident that GANA and the FMLN have split up their alliance: the latter party has its own candidate in today’s presidential election. (There are four candidates, including one for an alliance of ARENA and the Christian Democrats and the really old ruling party, PCN.)

A problem with an electoral cycle like the one El Salvador uses is that it allows some presidents a honeymoon election, while others do not get an assembly election till near or after the middle of their term. As we know, honeymoon elections tend to give a large boost to the party or alliance supporting a just-elected president (see France 2017 for an absolutely classic case study). Bukele will have to figure out how to govern with an assembly in which his own party has only 10 of 84 seats until the next assembly election, in 2021. And that date is 40% into his term, meaning the normal working of electoral cycles will not likely benefit him much.

I have been fascinated by El Salvador’s unusual electoral cycle for a long time, and it just keeps on delivering. However, were they to ask, I’d tell them to amend their constitution and make elections concurrent.

One thing is for sure, the Salvadoran party system, which I have long characterized as rigid, is no more–a fact already foreshadowed by the 2018 assembly result, as I noted at the time.

El Salvador ballots

Thanks to the really wonderful Twitter feed of La Prensa Grafica, following are some photos of voted ballots from El Salvador’s assembly elections of 4 March.

The ballot format is “free list” under which it is a party-list proportional-representation system, but unlike other types of list, the voter can give preference votes to candidates nominated on different lists (a feature sometimes known as panachage).

Here is one that is marked for candidates in several different lists, but none in the government-supporting parties, FMLN (red) and GANA (orange).

Here is one that marked all of the candidates in the ARENA party.

That’s a lot of work! A voter who wants to vote a straight ticket can simply put an X over the party symbol at the top, and it counts the same as a vote for each candidate on the list.

Now here is one whose vote will count for no one, but the voter had fun making statements.

Under the free-list system, a party’s votes is the sum of all the preference votes its candidates receive (including the label votes counted as one for each candidate on the list). Any preference vote thus contributes to the list’s pooled vote total for purposes of calculating seats per list. If a voter does not cast all M votes (where M is the district magnitude), that voter is sacrificing a percentage of his or her entitled voting weight.

This process also means that calculating national party vote totals is not straightforward. I am not sure what method of weighting votes across the varying-magnitude districts is used in El Salvador’s official reporting of national totals.

El Salvador–unusual legislative organization

On 14 May, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador passed the required measure to organize the governance of the chamber for the coming term, following the elections this past March. It is a rather unusual arrangement: The second and third largest parties will each hold the assembly presidency for half of the three-year term.

Lorena Peña of the FMLN will be assembly president for 18 months, and then on 8 November 2016, Guillermo Gallegos of GANA will assume the assembly presidency for the remainder of the term.

The opposition ARENA won 32 seats (39% of 84), against 31 (37.8%) for the FMLN and 11 (13.4%) for the GANA. The latter party has its origins in a split in the right-wing ARENA that occurred following the election of the first president from the left-wing FMLN in 2009. It has been an ally of the FMLN ever since. ARENA partner PCN won 4 seats on its own in the election, and another three seats were won by ARENA-PCN alliances in various constituencies. Therefore, the actual balance of the assembly is 42 FMLN+GANA (51.2%) to 39 ARENA+PCN (47.6%); one seat was won by the Christian Democrats (PDC).

The directing board (junta directiva) will have 4 members each from ARENA and the FMLN and 3 each from GANA and the PCN. This body, then, will have equality between the two blocs, thereby slightly over-representing the right-wing bloc. I do not know the actual powers of the presidency vs. the directing board.

I certainly do not claim exhaustive knowledge of how power is divvied up in legislative organization around the world, but the alternation of the presidency for equal time periods between two parties that are quite unequal in strength (and second and third in seat totals) must be a rare occurrence.

El Salvador joins the panachage (free-list) ranks, president’s party holds steady

El Salvador held its legislative election on 1 March, using a modified electoral system. The country had already left behind the closed list in 2012, replacing it with an open list. This year the country moved to panachage, the variant of open list in which voters may vote for candidates on different lists (sometimes called “free list”).

El Salvador is one of the few pure presidential systems still using an electoral cycle (a long-term interest of mine) consisting of all non-concurrent elections, with presidential terms of five years and legislative terms of three years. This election is in the first year of the incumbent president’s term, and offered neither “surge” nor decline in his party’s legislative support.

I was first tipped off to the change to panachage by a remark in a Tico Times article just before the election that said:

For the first time, voters will be able to select individual candidates from any party rather than being forced to vote for a single party with an established list of candidates. Voters can still opt to simply choose a party.

This is definitely far more detailed than your average journalistic note about an electoral system. But to be sure, I checked with the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, which has a very useful gallery of ballot images and instruction cards. Below I post an image of the instructions for the district (department) of Cabañas.

It offers the voter five options:

1. 1. Vote solely for the list of a party or coalition;

1. 2. Vote for a list and mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” on that list;

1. 3. Mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” in one list (without also indicating a list vote);

1. 4. “Mark candidates of distinct political parties or coalition” or candidates of distinct parties and a non-party candidate”, not exceeding the total number of deputies elected from the district.

1. 5. Mark the photo of a non-party candidate.**

It is option 4 that clearly establishes panachage.

By contrast, in 2012, the options excluded any mention of marking candidates across different lists.

See also images of a portion of the ballot from 2015 or 2012.

For a long time the only panachage–or free list–systems in use at the national level (to my knowledge) were in Luxembourg and Switzerland. In 2005, Honduras adopted such a system, and now one of its immediate neighbors has followed suit. (I believe Ecuador still uses a panchage system adopted several years ago; Venezuela used one at least once, but only at the municipal level.)

As for the election itself, there was a considerable delay in reporting the results. It does not seem that the panachage system had anything to do with the delay.

Preliminary results suggest that the opposition ARENA will have a plurality of seats, with 35 (of 84). That would represent a gain of two seats from the 2012 legislative election. The governing FMLN is likely to have 31 (no change) and its ally GANA 10 (-1). The PCN (the pre-1979 ruling party, still just hanging on) is expected to have 6 (-1) and the PDC would have 2 (a doubling of seats for this party that was the main alternative to the right before the civil war ended).

El Salvador hence essentially maintains its long-term relative stasis and close left-right division. The incumbent president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN, was elected by a very narrow margin a year ago. This election barely changes the balance of power, even though it occurs within the first year of a president’s five-year term and hence could qualify as a “honeymoon election”. In Salvadoran politics, there really isn’t much of a honeymoon, or any near-term prospect for the much-anticipated realignment. The big swing to the FMLN in the 2009 legislative election looks, in retrospect, like a blip within what is otherwise ongoing stasis.

It will be interesting to see if the move to an electoral system allowing cross-party voting for the first time begins to break down El Salvador’s remarkably rigid partisan lines.***

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* Elections could be concurrent every 15 years, as they were in 1994. However, in 2009, the legislative election was shifted to the “counter-honeymoon” and held in January, with the presidential election, as usual, in March.

** In both options 4 and 5, the reference to independents is singular; logically if voting for an independent is an alternative to voting for a party, one could vote for only one independent just as one can vote for only one party. On the other hand, in a panachage world, one actually can vote for more than  one party (assuming a vote for any candidate also counts for the party on whose list the candidate was nominated), so why would there need to be a restriction on the number of votes that a voter may give for independents? (Note that it is probably quite difficult for an independent candidate to be elected in any case.) [I edited this footnote shortly after posting.]

*** Whether the partisan lines over El Salvador can ever be broken down in the United States is another matter.

Salvadoran presidential runoff, 2014

Today Salvadorans vote in their runoff presidential election. FMLN candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén should win easily. For one thing, he almost won in the first round, with about 49% and a 10-point lead over runner-up Norman Quijano of ARENA. Second, polling has shown that those who voted for third-place candidate, Tony Saca, a former president from ARENA, were splitting at least evenly if not towards Sánchez Cerén. The latter might seem like a surprise–a right-wing ex-president’s supporters swinging to a former guerrilla fighter–but Saca split from his party in 2010 and led a group of ex-ARENA legislators in forming part of the legislative majority of incumbent president Mauricio Funes, also of the FMLN.

Sánchez Cerén will inherit the legislature elected in 2012 in which ARENA is the largest party (33 seats), but the FMLN (31) and Saca’s GANA (11) have a majority of the 84 seats. The next legislative election is a year away.

Elections in Costa Rica and El Salvador

Presidential elections are taking place today in two countries in Central America, El Salvador and Costa Rica. The latter country also has legislative elections, whereas El Salvador uses a non-concurrent cycle and will not elect its National Assembly for another year.

DW says:

Experts say both of Sunday’s votes will result in runoffs, as neither candidate leading in the polls is likely to get the 50 percent plus one vote needed to declare victory.

One might wonder who these experts are, as in Costa Rica, it takes 40% to win in a single round, not a majority.

For El Salvador, an average of five recent polls puts the incumbent Vice President Salvador Sanchez of the FMLN in the lead, but indeed well short of a majority: 35.6%. The ARENA candidate, Norman Quijano, currently mayor of San Salvador, is second with an average of 31.3% in the polls. In third with around 11% is Elias Antonio Saca of GANA. Saca is a former president from ARENA who split from his party with a good chunk of its caucus in the current National Assembly to lend support to Mauricio Funes, elected in 2009 as the first president from the FMLN. Obviously, his voters will prove pivotal in the upcoming presidential race just as his votes have been pivotal in the legislature.

As for Costa Rica, the race is said to be tight between Johnny Araya of the ruling National Liberation Party and Jose Maria Villalta from a left-wing Broad Front that has been only a marginal force until now. In fact, other than in 2002, Costa Rica has never required a runoff, as it has had two parties generally dominant since the current democratic regime was founded in the late 1940s. However, in recent years it has been more fragmented. (In 2006 the winner barely averted a runoff, and both leading candidates were just barely over 40%.) Perhaps runoffs are going to be needed more frequently in the future.

Elections of 18 January

Two noteworthy legislative elections are being held today, in El Salvador and the German state of Hesse. Both are of interest not only for what will happen today, but also for what they signal about upcoming elections.

El Salvador

Today Salvadorans go to the polls to elect the 84-seat Legislative Assembly and municipal posts throughout the country. The main thing to watch will be, how big are the gains for the FMLN (the ex-guerrilla leftist political party)? The party currently holds 32 seats (38%), and as I noted at the time of the last legislative elections, the country’s electoral politics has been in stasis since the negotiated end of the civil war in 1994. Will this be the election that breaks the stasis? Maybe, but there is a major caveat.

The last legislative election, in 2006, was held in the month of March. In fact, every legislative election back to 1952 has been held in March (except in 1960, when they waited till April). For that matter, every presidential election under the current constitution (1983) has been held in March (with a runoff in April or May, when needed). So why are Salvadorans going to the polls in January?

Presidential terms are five years and legislative terms three years, and so they will occur in the same year every 15 years. The last time elections to the two branches occurred in the same year–math whizzes will have recognized already that that was in 1994–they were on the same day in March. And therein lay a problem for the Salvadoran right.

The FMLN has been leading the polls in advance of this year’s presidential race for many months. To ward off a possible coattail effect, the center-right parties that control the legislature and presidency de-coupled the elections. So instead of a concurrent contest, El Salvador will have what I refer to as a “counterhoneymoon election” today. A legislative election shortly before a presidential election provides voters and party leaders with information, as CNN says in the opening paragraph of its news story on the elections:

El Salvador will elect more than 340 local and congressional officials Sunday, two months before the nation’s presidential election. But Sunday’s results could go a long way toward determining who that next president will be.

Well, actually, I think we already know–barring surprises–and as I suggested above, that’s precisely why these elections are today. But the general point is that these elections will either show the left as being more vulnerable than opinion polls and pundits suggest, or they will show the right what options it has to turn the tide by March.

It would be a surprise if the FMLN won a majority of seats today. It just might have had a shot at a majority (or close to it) had the legislative elections been left concurrent with the presidential race. But I would regard anything short of 39 seats for the FMLN as a victory for the right. Why 39? Because that is the highest seat total any party has won since the FMLN began competing in elections. More importantly, 39 was the total won by the long-ruling ARENA in 1994–in a concurrent election in which the ARENA presidential candidate won easily (49-25% in the first round, 68-32 in the runoff). That sort of presidential “pull” is exactly what ARENA wanted to prevent the FMLN from getting this time around.

Hesse

The results of this election are already in, and the Christian Democratic Union (the party of federal PM Angela Merkel) has won “handily.” DW reports:

Near-complete returns show Merkel’s CDU, lead by Roland Koch, narrowly increasing their share of the vote to around 38 percent. The SPD suffered dramatic losses, slumping more than 13 percent to a historic low of just over 23 percent. Among the smaller parties, the liberal Free Democrats took 16 percent of the vote, their best result in Hesse in more than 50 years. The Greens had 14 and the Left Party five percent respectively. The CDU says it now hopes to form a coalition government with the FDP. Voter turnout was low at just 60 percent.

This election is of greater interest than a state election normally would be for two reasons. First, federal elections are due later this year, and this is one of the last states to be voting before the national electorate will go to the polls.¹ With both the CDU (accompanied by its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union) and its partner in the federal “grand coalition,” the Social Democrats (SPD), less than eager to continue the current arrangement, this state result is a potential bellwether.

The second item of interest in this election is that the state had been to the polls just under a year ago. In the 2008 election, the CDU and SPD each had won 42 seats (out of 110) and the Left (based on a union of ex-communists with leftist who had split from the SPD) had a breakthrough, winning 6 seats. The Greens had 9 and the FDP 11. This result meant no majority for either a center-left or a center-right coalition unless the center-left coalition included the Left party.

Following the 2008 election, coalition bargaining took some time and ultimately produced a formula in which the SPD and Greens would govern with the outside support of the Left. Never mind that the SPD leader, Andrea Ypsilanti, had explictly promised in her campaign not to work with the Left. It was the only possible majority unless the Greens, CDU and FDP would work together (which was also discussed, but failed). And then the SPD caucus vetoed Ypsilanti’s plan. That display of unwillingness of the SPD to set the precedent, in the old West Germany, of cooperation with the Left set the stage for this re-run (with a new SPD leader).²

The CDU has to feel pretty good about its chances in the federal elections after waiting out the center-left divisions in Hesse.

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1. There will also be elections in Brandenburg, Saarland, Saxony, and Thuringia on 30 August. Federal parliamentary elections will be 27 September.

2. This summary is based primarily on my recollections of coverage over several months at DW-TV’s Journal. See also the brief summary from AFP.