Latest news with #constitutional changes
Globe and Mail
02-08-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
El Salvador approves changes allowing Bukele to seek indefinite re-election
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country's Legislative Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential re-election and extend presidential terms to six years. Lawmaker Ana Figueroa from the New Ideas party had proposed the changes to five articles of the constitution. The proposal also included eliminating the second round of the election where the two top vote-getters from the first round face off. New Ideas and its allies in the Legislative Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favour and three opposed. Bukele overwhelmingly won re-election last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 to allow re-election to a second five-year term. Observers have worried that Bukele had a plan to consolidate power since at least 2021, when a newly elected Congress with a strong governing party majority voted to remove the magistrates of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court. Those justices had been seen as the last check on the popular president. Since then, Bukele has only grown more popular. The Biden administration's initial expressions of concern gave way to quiet acceptance as Bukele announced his run for re-election. With the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House in January, Bukele had a new powerful ally and quickly offered Trump help by taking more than 200 deportees from other countries into a newly built prison for gang members. El Salvador's President says he won't be releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. Trump administration maintains control over men deported to El Salvador, officials tell UN Figueroa argued Thursday that federal lawmakers and mayors can already seek re-election as many times as they want. 'All of them have had the possibility of re-election through popular vote, the only exception until now has been the presidency,' Figueroa said. She also proposed that Bukele's current term, scheduled to end June 1, 2029, instead finish June 1, 2027, to put presidential and congressional elections on the same schedule. It would also allow Bukele to seek re-election to a longer term two years earlier. Marcela Villatoro of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), one of three votes against the proposals, told her fellow lawmakers that 'Democracy in El Salvador has died!' 'You don't realize what indefinite re-election brings: It brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy ... there's corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and halts democracy and political participation,' she said. Suecy Callejas, the assembly's vice president, said that 'power has returned to the only place that it truly belongs ... to the Salvadoran people.' Bukele did not immediately comment. Bukele, who once dubbed himself 'the world's coolest dictator,' is highly popular, largely because of his heavy-handed fight against the country's powerful street gangs. Voters have been willing to overlook evidence that his administration like others before it had negotiated with the gangs, before seeking a state of emergency that suspended some constitutional rights and allowed authorities to arrest and jail tens of thousands of people. His success with security and politically has inspired imitators in the region who seek to replicate his style. Most recently, Bukele's government has faced international criticism for the arrests of high-profile lawyers who have been outspoken critics of his administration. One of the country's most prominent human rights group announced in July it was moving its operations out of El Salvador for the safety of its people, accusing the government of a 'wave of repression.'
South China Morning Post
01-08-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
El Salvador clears path for endless Bukele rule by scrapping presidential term limits
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country's Legislative Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential re-election and extend presidential terms to six years. Lawmaker Ana Figueroa from the New Ideas party had proposed the changes to five articles of the constitution. The proposal also included eliminating the second round of the election where the two top vote-getters from the first round face off. New Ideas and its allies in the Legislative Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favour and three opposed. Bukele overwhelmingly won re-election last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 to allow re-election to a second five-year term. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has cozied up to US President Donald Trump. File photo: TNS Observers have worried that Bukele had a plan to consolidate power since at least 2021, when a newly elected Congress with a strong governing party majority voted to remove the magistrates of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court. Those justices had been seen as the last check on the popular president.
Telegraph
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Votes for 16-year-olds won't improve politics
Extending votes to 16-year-olds at all UK elections must be one of the most short-sighted and desperate measures ever to be brought before Parliament. It is not as if the country were so well governed that we could afford the risk. Yet the Labour Government is embarking on the dangerous experiment of handing power to teenagers who for almost all other purposes are deemed by the law to be children. Worse: like almost all constitutional changes, this one is likely to be irreversible. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a Prime Minister who until recently seemed confused about the biology of sex should also be in a muddle about the physiology of adolescents. It is true that at 16 one may well be physically able to serve one's country, often with conspicuous courage. A handful of prodigies can astonish us with their talents, too. Yet it is no less a fact that the brain continues to develop well into one's twenties. Children of 16 are generally less capable of thinking ahead or of assessing danger than adults. Sir Keir Starmer is untroubled by such realities. For him, apparently, the only relevant criterion is that 16-year-olds may pay taxes. But it does not follow from this that they should be entitled to vote. Otherwise, by the same logic the millions of people who do not pay taxes would lose the vote. Children are represented by their parents in many fields until they reach adulthood. They also require protection: one reason why the age of consent for marriage has been raised to 18 (not that Angela Rayner had noticed). However precocious, a voter of 16 lacks the experience to detect the fools, frauds and fanatics who are unfortunately ubiquitous in politics. No doubt Labour expects that this act of constitutional tomfoolery will favour the party, because young people are assumed to lean to the Left. But this gimmick is no great cause célèbre. Unlike women in the early 20th century, who fought hard for the suffrage, fewer than half of the Welsh 16 and 17-year-olds invited to vote for the Senedd could even be bothered to register. It is no accident that few other countries have lowered their voting age below 18. In Austria, which did so in 2007, the effect has been polarising: the younger the voters, the more attracted they are to extremes, especially on the Right. The beneficiaries have not been the older centrist parties, but the anti-immigration nationalists of the Freedom Party. Here, too, Sir Keir may well find himself hoist by his own petard. What if the newly enfranchised boys and girls reject his bribery and cast their ballots for Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage?
