New Horizons for El Salvador?

Yet while Funes may represent hope and opportunity for domestic supporters and international admirers alike, the new president surely faces a rocky road ahead.   

Funes assumes power at a moment of increasing uncertainty: the country’s economy weakens by the day; hundreds of emigrants flee each week in search of opportunity to the north; street violence is spiraling out of control; and the remaining population is thoroughly polarized.   If Funes is to meet the high expectations of those around him, he’ll need to take action on a formidable and expanding agenda of issues.  

Most immediately, the Funes administration will be forced to confront El Salvador’s deteriorating economy.   After several years of relative growth, the country has been hit hard recently by the global economic downturn.   Food shortages and spiking commodity prices have left average Salvadorans struggling to maintain bare minimum standards of living.   Remittances from Salvadoran laborers abroad-which account for nearly 17 percent of El Salvador’s annual GDP-have declined significantly, exacerbating already distressing circumstances for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.   State revenue from tax collection is down nearly 10 percent, and industrial output has declined by a similar amount.   Skilled and semi-skilled laborers especially feel the crunch as unemployment figures have mounted with breathtaking speed in the first quarter of 2009.

Adding to El Salvador’s economic distress, worsening social conditions continue to challenge the state’s ability to provide public goods.   With so few opportunities at home, thousands of Salvadorans leave their country each month seeking work in the north. Conservative estimates suggest that nearly a quarter of the country’s population resides abroad (mostly in the United States), which if true indicates the extent to which traditional family structures have been undermined.   At the same time, the startling rise of the nation’s gang networks-which often serve to fill the void for children of emigrant parents-have destabilized El Salvador’s national security with wanton violence and highly organized criminal activity.   The country currently suffers from the fourth highest murder rate in the world, trailing only Iraq, Sierra Leone, and neighboring Guatemala.  

Complicating matters further, Funes will likely face stiff resistance to many of his ameliorative policy proposals in the legislature.   While the FMLN enjoyed Funes’ historic victory, the party failed to capture an outright majority of seats in the assembly.   As a result, the new president will be forced to spend considerable political capital to reach bipartisan consensus with his conservative adversaries if he hopes to make good on his campaign promises.         

Perhaps more interesting still, Funes will have to continually negotiate the internal politics of his own FMLN party.   The media savvy candidate successfully marketed himself during the campaign as a cross between Brazil’s Lula de Silva and Barack Obama-the very model of moderateness.   Yet the FMLN party, to which Funes is a relative newcomer, is packed with hard line elements left over from the civil war.   It is far from clear that FMLN militants will comply with their new president’s centrist political agenda.

The tension Funes experiences while attempting to accommodate political conservatives as he appeals to his leftist base will not be helped by the country’s polarized political atmosphere.   The dramatic electoral shift from ARENA to the FMLN obscures the fact that the country remains politically divided, a bitter residue from the country’s twelve year civil war.   If pressures from the economic decline continue to escalate, party loyalists from each camp may choose to rally popular support by adopting uncompromising positions at both ends of the political spectrum.

Despite these complex challenges, however, Funes has much going for him.   He is young, charismatic, generally well-received, politically pragmatic and has the benefit of international goodwill and support from all points along the political spectrum.   Above all, Funes possesses a desire “to rebuild and reinvent the nation…to improve what is already good and do things that have never been done.”  

Obviously, soaring rhetoric of hope and change is one thing. The business of politics is another. With the festivities now through, it’s time to get to work.

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