El Salvador: Political Parties & Elections

El Salvador's modern party system took shape during and after the country's twelve-year civil war, which ended with the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords. The conflict gave rise to the two parties that would dominate national politics for the following decades: the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), founded in 1981 by figures from the political right, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), formed from a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups. For roughly two decades these two parties alternated control of the presidency, with ARENA governing from 1989 to 2009 and the FMLN winning the 2009 and 2014 elections under presidents Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sánchez Cerén.

Public frustration with corruption and gang violence under both establishment parties opened space for new political movements. Nayib Bukele, a former FMLN mayor of San Salvador who was expelled from the party in 2017, founded Nuevas Ideas that same year, registering it as a national party in 2018. Barred from fielding Bukele as its presidential candidate in time for the 2019 election, the movement instead ran him on the ticket of the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA); he won with just over half the vote, ending three decades of alternation between ARENA and the FMLN. Nuevas Ideas went on to win a supermajority in the 2021 legislative elections, giving Bukele's government control over the Legislative Assembly.

By the 2024 general elections, the two former dominant parties had each fallen below three percent of the vote and lost every municipality they had previously held, while Nuevas Ideas secured near-unanimous control of the Legislative Assembly and the great majority of local governments. The result marked a near-total collapse of the two-party system that had defined Salvadoran politics since the civil war, leaving Nuevas Ideas as the country's dominant political force heading into the following term.