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On 28 February 2021, New Ideas, the party founded in 2017 and led by President Nayib Bukele, won El Salvador's legislative elections by a landslide. Bukele's party secured 66.5 percent of the vote and 56 of the legislature's 84 seats—an unprecedented supermajority. Meanwhile, the two parties that had dominated Salvadoran politics since the early 1990s—the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) on the right and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) on the left—were decimated, managing to secure a combined total of only 19 seats. For the first time in El Salvador's democratic history, one man could legislate alone. Bukele did not wait to take advantage of his legislative supermajority. On the evening of May 1—just hours after the new legislators had been sworn in—he and his legislative allies fired the independent attorney-general and the judges of the Constitutional Chamber, El Salvador's highest court. By the following morning, the legislature had packed both institutions with loyalists. Bukele had used his legislative majority to defang the judicial branch in only a day. On Twitter he framed these events as a victory for democracy: "The Salvadoran people," he tweeted May 1, "said, through their representatives: You're fired!" Earlier that day Bukele claimed that "this is called democracy. In 200 years, our country had not savored it, but now we do." Defending the judicial shakeup the next morning, he added that "seventy-five percent of the Salvadoran people voted in free elections for the change we are now seeing."1 Indeed, polls suggest that over 70 percent of Salvadorans support Bukele's dismissal of the attorney-general and judges.2 Yet Bukele's attack on the judicial branch was a serious blow to Salvadoran democracy. Free elections are essential to democratic politics, but so are checks and balances: As Guillermo O'Donnell observed in this journal, "Accountability runs not only vertically, making elected officials answerable to the ballot box, but also horizontally, across a network of relatively autonomous powers."3 Bukele and his allies may have been overwhelmingly elected in free elections, but by subverting El Salvador's lead prosecutor and its highest court—two crucial institutions of horizontal accountability—they made the country less, not more, democratic. How did Salvadoran democracy reach this breaking point? Most Salvadorans see their political establishment as corrupt and ineffective....