By The Navarro Report Staff
El Salvador’s Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) confirmed this week that it has seated the Junta Electoral de Voto en el Extranjero (JELVEX) with nominees from Nuevas Ideas, ARENA, and the FMLN, and has extended until Sept. 9 the deadline for parties to submit nominees to staff the Juntas Receptoras de Votos en el Extranjero (JRVEX) — the bodies that will administer the diaspora vote across 92 sites abroad. Both moves are routine administrative steps on paper. In practice, they are the visible machinery of a electoral calendar that has been fundamentally restructured over the past 18 months to accommodate President Nayib Bukele’s expected campaign for a third term in the Feb. 28, 2027 general election.
The path that made this possible did not begin with the headline-grabbing reform of July 2025 — it began years earlier, with a change to the referee before the rules of the game were rewritten. In 2021, the newly elected Nuevas Ideas-controlled Assembly removed the sitting magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber, the Supreme Court body responsible for ruling on the constitutionality of laws, and replaced them with judges aligned with the president. That reconstituted chamber ruled in September 2021 that Bukele could seek immediate reelection in 2024, despite Articles 152, 154, and 248 of the Constitution having explicitly barred a sitting president from running for the office he already held. Bukele took office for his second term on June 1, 2024, over objections from opposition parties, legal scholars, and international observers who argued the ruling had no constitutional basis and rested entirely on a judiciary the executive had installed.
The second and more consequential step came in January 2025, when the Assembly — by then in its second consecutive term under Nuevas Ideas control — ratified a change to Article 248, the constitutional provision governing how the Constitution itself may be amended. Historically, amending the Salvadoran Constitution required approval by one legislature followed by ratification from a subsequent, differently constituted legislature — a deliberate check meant to prevent any single governing majority from unilaterally rewriting the country’s foundational law. The revised Article 248 collapsed that two-legislature requirement into one: a constitutional amendment can now be approved and ratified in a single legislative session, by a three-quarters vote (45 of 60 deputies), with no requirement for input from a future, potentially different Assembly.
That procedural change is what made the July 31, 2025 reform possible in a single night. In one legislative session, the Nuevas Ideas-dominated Assembly approved and then immediately ratified amendments to Articles 75, 80, 133, 152, and 154, passing with 57 of 60 votes. Article 152, which had barred anyone who served as president during the immediately preceding term from running again, was stripped of that restriction entirely. Article 80, which had provided for suspension of citizenship rights for anyone promoting indefinite reelection, was rewritten to remove that penalty. Article 75 similarly dropped language treating promotion of reelection as a civic offense. Beyond eliminating term limits outright, the package extended the presidential term from five to six years, eliminated the runoff (segunda vuelta) required when no candidate wins an outright majority, and included a transitional provision shortening Bukele’s current term — originally set to run until June 1, 2029 — so that presidential elections could be folded into the same February 2027 cycle as legislative and municipal races, unifying what had been separate election calendars into one.
Opposition legislators did not go quietly, even if their numbers made resistance symbolic rather than effective. ARENA deputy Marcela Villatoro held up a sign reading “Hoy ha muerto la democracia en El Salvador” — “Today, democracy has died in El Salvador” — during the floor debate, and later said the reform was approved “sin consulta, de forma burda y cínica.” Claudia Ortiz of the opposition party VAMOS argued the changes were designed to “perpetuar a un pequeño grupo en el poder,” perpetuating a small group’s hold on power while deepening poverty. Nuevas Ideas legislator Ana Figueroa countered that the reform simply returns power to Salvadoran voters, noting that reelection has historically been permitted for nearly every other elected office in the country without prohibition. Bukele, who enjoys an 85.2% approval rating according to the most recent polling — with just 1.4% of respondents identifying concentrated executive power as a problem — has separately defended the changes by arguing that constitutional amendments in most countries have historically come through wars or coups rather than legislative votes, framing his own path as comparatively benign.
With the constitutional and procedural groundwork now complete, what remains is administrative: the TSE’s current work sealing JELVEX and JRVEX memberships, finalizing the 92 overseas voting locations, and running its Plan General de Elecciones (PLAGEL) 2027 on a timeline that folds three separate races into a single election day. Bukele must formally register his candidacy with the TSE between Oct. 1 and Nov. 19, 2026. Barring an unexpected legal or political obstacle — a low-probability scenario given the judiciary’s composition and the government’s legislative supermajority — the same electoral authority now assembling foreign voting boards is expected to certify a Bukele candidacy for a third consecutive term within the next two months, a term that would be unimaginable under the Constitution that existed before 2021.
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