The polycrisis of democracy in the Americas beyond populism: assessing the impact of Bukelism’s international expansion

Résumé fourni par la source

Since his 2022 spectacular imprisonment wave, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has given its name to a political model – Bukelism – often presented as populism in a substantial body of academic literature. In this paper, we argue that populism is not an appropriate lens to understand neither the political nature of the phenomenon nor its consequence. Combining a theoretical discussion of populism with a discourse analysis and a compared politics methodology applied to the cases of El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras, this article argues that, far from representing a form of populism, Bukelism emerges as a new form of authoritarianism leading to a polycrisis of democracy. After reviewing the literature on interpretations of Bukelism in terms of populism (“crypto-populism,” “punitive populism,” etc.), this article contrasts this superficial use of the concept with a long theoretical tradition that conceptualizes populism as “the redemptive face of democracy” or “fundamental democracy”, to show how the use of the concept of populism to analyze Bukelism tends to invisibilize or trivialize the authoritarian nature of this security-oriented model. Furthermore, a discourse analysis of Bukele’s addresses to the nation reveals that, rather than justifying his actions through a ‘people versus elites’ dichotomy, he directly attacks democracy and human rights, blaming them for perpetuating criminal violence. Using a most different design systems method of comparing political outcomes, we analyze the institutional changes promoted by Bukelism, drawing on a wide range of data on human rights violations as well as indicators related to individual, civil, and political rights, to demonstrate the overtly authoritarian nature of this model. Drawing on the concept of the “polycrisis of democracy,” we demonstrate how the “inter-retroactions” related to the “struggles for meaning” around democracy – brought about by the rapid expansion of Bukele’s security model – result in an abrupt democratic decline, and increased drug-related and state violence, and, paradoxically, in a rise of insecurity.

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