The self-described “world’s coolest dictator”, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, has an approval rating of 94%, supports life sentences for 12-year-olds, and has imprisoned over 3,000 children since introducing a national ‘state of emergency’ to combat criminal gangs four years ago.
“How reliable is this polling?” I asked openDemocracy’s Americas editor, Diana Cariboni, as she was translating and editing this week’s cover story. Pretty reliable, it seems: The young, Trump-supporting, crypto-pushing Bukele is immensely popular across Latin America, consistently polling higher than any other global leader, including among voters on the left.
What is the progressive commentariat misdiagnosing about the popularity of authoritarians? Prof. Guy Standing, who coined the term the ‘precariat’ to refer to the new working class, has thoughts. “The precariat has been a class-in-the-making, not yet a class-for-itself,” Standing writes in a perceptive essay for this newsletter. “What this means, put crudely, is that those in it are more united about a politics of grievance, centred on chronic insecurity, than about a preferred politics of hope.”
