El Salvador will hold presidential elections on February 28, 2027, the electoral tribunal said Wednesday, opening the way for President Nayib Bukele to seek a third term after constitutional changes removed presidential term limits. Bukele has drawn praise for sharply reducing gang violence but faced criticism over rights abuses during…
Page A3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 October 2026
Tribunal sets date for the third term the assembly legalized before his own party nominated him for it.
As it ran on the front
Here is how a forbidden thing becomes a legal one without anybody breaking a rule: you write the rules yourself, in order, a year apart, so each step looks like paperwork and not like a coup.
On July 31, 2025, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador voted to abolish the presidential term limit. In the same session it stretched the presidential term from five years to six, and moved the next election up from 2029 to 2027. Three separate changes, one Thursday, and they add up to a single sentence: the man already in the chair gets to stay in it. No law was broken, because the body that writes the laws had just finished rewriting this one.…
…(cont) Eleven months later, on July 12, 2026, Bukele's party, Nuevas Ideas, nominated him for the third term the Assembly had cleared the previous July. By then the nomination wasn't news; it was a formality arriving to collect a decision that had already been made. The only piece still missing was a date on a calendar.
On Wednesday, the electoral tribunal supplied it: February 28, 2027. The tribunal did not invent anything either. It took the six-year term the Assembly had already written, the limit the Assembly had already erased, and the nominee the party had already filed, and set a square on the calendar around all three. Line up the dates — July 2025, July 2026, October 2026 — and you are not reading about an election. You are reading a checklist, closed out on schedule.
That is the part that should sit heavier than a strongman seizing power outright. What moved here was a legislature's vote, a party's nomination, and a tribunal's calendar — three ordinary institutional acts, stacked in order. Every verb in that list is dull on purpose. Dull is the whole design: a ribbon-cutting dressed in the clothes of due process, document by document, deadline by deadline.
The gang crackdown that made Bukele popular enough to attempt this is real; that popularity is exactly the cover the paperwork needed. A leader who delivers one visible thing gets room to rewrite the rule you cannot see him rewrite. Term limits do not usually fail with a tank in the street.
“They didn't need a tank, they needed a calendar. The assembly erased the term limit in 2025, the party nominated him in 2026, and this week a tribunal stamped a date on all of it without one outside signature required. That's the whole trick — do every step by the book, and the book stays clean the entire way.”
“The Assembly has every right to amend its own constitution — that's called legislating, not scheming. Voters can still remove him at the ballot box if they're unhappy, it's not like anyone's blocked from running against — well, there's no real opposition positioned to beat him, but that's a turnout problem, not a legal one. Did I say turnout problem? I mean — look, the gang numbers are down, focus on the gang numbers.”
The receipts
· The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador abolishes presidential term limits, increases presidential terms from 5 to 6 years, and moves the date of the next presidential election from 2029 to 2027. (BBC from the morgue, 31 Jul 2025
· Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is nominated by his political party, Nuevas Ideas, to run for a third presidential term. The Legislative Assembly previously approved amendments to abolish presidenti from the morgue, 12 Jul 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.