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.
Wow, a literal whataboutism.
The absolute best case scenario is a Francisco Franco. Absolute best case.
And yes, it’s an inherent part of human nature. The more consolidated power is within an organization, the more vulnerable it is to abuse. Dictatorships are on one end of the spectrum, direct democracies on the other.
Have you ever heard a parent say “eat your food, there are starving children in China”? The children were starving in China because Mao decided that sparrows were eating too much of the grain harvest and launched a pest eradication campaign. With nobody in a position of authority with the ability to stop the campaign (or even question the wisdom of it) and sparrows were killed en masse.
Sparrows eat grain but they also eat insects. With the sparrows gone the bugs got out of control and sparked a famine. It was the worst man-made disaster in human history. As many as 55 million people died because a dictator tried to do a good thing and was able to act without restriction or oversight.
One bad decision - even if made with the best intentions - can end in disaster. That’s why checks and balances matter. Do they slow things down? Yes. But the chart-topping governmental fuck ups are all put there by totalitarians.