On March 4, Salvadorans went to the polls for legislative and municipal elections. According to preliminary results, the opposition Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, won 37 of 84 seats in the Legislative Assembly. The ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won 23, down from 31. The results are widely regarded as a stinging defeat for the FMLN, which also lost several key mayoral races, including in the capital, San Salvador. 

Besides the two leading parties, the Grand Alliance for National Unity, or GANA, took 11 seats in the assembly and the National Coalition Party, or PCN, eight. Several smaller parties took a handful of seats, and for the first time an unaffiliated candidate will also enter the assembly.

The consequences of the elections for the FMLN will be significant. With more than a year of his term remaining, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren—of the FMLN—is unlikely to be able to push through any legislative agenda. Moreover, as a result of the party’s losses, he will be unable to veto opposition legislation. Together with smaller parties from the right, ARENA could put together a simple majority or even a supermajority—56 seats—to effectively bypass the FMLN on major appointments and block any FMLN legislation for the coming year. 

ARENA will also have the advantage in key elections and appointments reserved for the assembly, including members of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, magistrates for the Court of Accounts, and the investigator for the ombudsman’s office on human rights. Also at stake is the re-election of Attorney General Douglas Melendez, whose tough stance on crime and corruption has been key in the fight against impunity. Melendez has pursued a number of high-profile corruption cases, including cases involving his predecessor, wealthy businessmen, the mediators involved in a controversial 2012 gang truce, and former Presidents Antonio “Tony” Saca and Mauricio Funes. Thus far, both GANA and the Christian Democratic Party—or PDC, which took three seats—have indicated they support reappointing Melendez when his three-year term ends in January 2019. 

Much of the postelection analysis has focused on the FMLN’s dramatic decline in the vote share between 2015 and 2018, a loss of some 372,000 votes representing a 44 percent decline.* But while ARENA increased its seats in the assembly and picked up important municipalities, its vote share also actually declined by 62,000 votes, or 7 percent. Three of the smaller parties—GANA, the PCN and the PDC—increased their vote shares, but the largest increase went to the null vote, which rose more than 150 percent to 226,000 ballots, or 3,000 more than for GANA, the third-largest party.

In general, Salvadorans have grown increasingly dissatisfied with parties, institutions and elections over the years. In November, a poll by the University of Central America’s Institute of Public Opinion, or IUDOP, revealed that more than 75 percent of voters had little to no interest in the March 4 elections. Just under two-thirds of respondents chose “None” as their preferred party, with ARENA and the FMLN garnering roughly 16 percent each. 

The FMLN’s popularity has also been slipping in recent years. The same IUDOP poll revealed a 67 percent disapproval rating for Sanchez Ceren, not the result a party wants to see during an election cycle. Like his predecessor, Mauricio Funes, also from the FMLN, Sanchez Ceren has been unable to effectively manage crime—which respondents see as being the same or worse on his watch—or invigorate the economy. Moreover, the party has struggled with internal democracy and corruption and, for some long-time supporters, has betrayed its basic principles.

The party compounded its problems when it split with Nayib Bukele, the popular mayor of San Salvador. Bukele, who has steered the capital city since March 2015, has been widely touted as the future of Salvadoran politics. His youth, positive messaging, social media savoir faire and relative political independence have earned him approval ratings of over 70 percent. But perhaps his star began to shine too brightly for the FMLN, which historically hasn’t tolerated political forces within the party that it cannot control. Bukele never hesitated to criticize the party’s historical leadership on social media and in other venues. He was expelled from the FMLN in October following accusations of sowing divisions within the party and allegedly calling an FMLN lawyer a “witch” during a municipal council meeting, a charge that he denies. 

The FMLN replaced Bukele in the San Salvador mayoral race with Jackeline Rivera, the daughter of a guerrilla leader and a child soldier herself. She was easily defeated by Ernesto Muyshondt, ARENA’s former vice president of ideology and a deputy for the party, despite Muyshondt having been implicated in a vote-buying scandal involving the MS-13 gang during the 2014 presidential elections. The timing of Bukele’s expulsion from the FMLN prevented him from running for re-election. Remarkably, more than 80 percent of respondents in the IUDOP’s November poll said they didn’t know either the ARENA or FMLN candidates in the San Salvador mayor’s race, but nearly 75 percent said Bukele’s departure would take votes from the FMLN. And indeed it did. It was Bukele who led the campaign to get voters to abstain or nullify ballots to protest corruption, and some did so with remarkable flair. The Economist proclaimed Bukele “the real winner” of the elections. 

Many have speculated that the legislative elections were a preview of the presidential election scheduled for March 2019. If so, trends would suggest that both of El Salvador’s major parties are in trouble. Less than a week after the elections, Bukele was already drawing huge crowds at a campaign rally in rural Chalatenango and had launched a website for his new political party, Nuevas Ideas. When asked if they would support Bukele for president on a ticket other than the FMLN, 60 percent of respondents to the IUDOP said they would. While Bukele’s critics are quick to point out that he doesn’t possess any clear ideology or that he is, perhaps, more concerned with his own image than the business of governing, his supporters point to a range of projects that address social problems in creative ways. 

The current frontrunner for the FMLN nomination is Gerson Martinez, another former guerrilla and long-serving deputy in the legislative assembly. Martinez was minister of public works for Funes and, until recently, Sanchez Ceren. Widely considered to be thoughtful, competent and honest by many who know him—including this author—the 64-year-old Martinez nevertheless represents the old FMLN to many voters who see Bukele as its future. ARENA will hold its presidential primary next month, though the frontrunners are all wealthy businessmen who haven’t held elected office. Among the most prominent is U.S.-educated businessman and attorney Javier Siman, who seeks to pull together voters who he claims “do not feel represented by any political party.”

But for too many Salvadoran voters, the guerrilla vs. businessman formula offered by the FMLN and ARENAS is a tired one. Growing disenchantment with politics as usual indicates that Salvadorans are searching for new leadership, a new path forward and—if Nayib Bukele has any say in the matter—new ideas.

* Editor’s note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the FMLN won 249,000 fewer votes compared to 2015. WPR regrets the error.

***Christine J. Wade is professor of political science and international studies at Washington College. She is the author of “Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador” and co-author of “Nicaragua: Emerging from the Shadow of the Eagle.”