Legislative Assembly of El Salvador

• 1. Introduction

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  The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, known in Spanish as the Asamblea Legislativa, sits at the center of a country that has spent two centuries figuring out how many chambers a democracy actually needs. In 1824, the body that would eventually become El Salvador's legislature was founded as part of the Central American Congress, a bicameral structure with a Senate. Over the next sixty-plus years, the question of whether one house or two best served Salvadoran democracy was debated, revised, and debated again. Then in 1886, a new constitution settled the matter: one chamber. That decision still stands today.

  What does that single chamber look like, and how has it shifted over the decades? How does a country the size of Massachusetts elect its lawmakers, and what does the distribution of seats reveal about political power in El Salvador? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. From Congress to Assembly

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  The year 1824 marked the beginning of El Salvador's formal legislative history, when the Central American Congress first took shape under the region's founding constitution. That constitution established a bicameral model: two chambers, including a Senate, mirroring the parliamentary structures popular elsewhere in the world at the time.

  The 1880 constitution kept the two-chamber arrangement intact. But six years later, the 1886 constitution made a break with that tradition by introducing a unicameral legislature. A single body would now hold all legislative power. That shift simplified how laws were passed and concentrated representation in one place, a design choice that has defined Salvadoran governance ever since.

  The election records stretching back to 1928 trace the body's long continuity. Assembly elections were held every two to three years across much of the twentieth century, though 1932 stands out as a year when elections were canceled entirely, a gap in the record that reflects the political turbulence of that era.

• 3. How Deputies Are Chosen

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  Salvadoran voters choose their assembly representatives through open-list proportional representation, a system that gives voters direct influence over which individual candidates within a party actually win seats. All deputies serve three-year terms and are eligible for immediate re-election.

  Until 2024, the assembly held 84 seats. Of those, 64 came from 14 multi-seat constituencies, each corresponding to one of the country's 14 departments. Those departmental constituencies varied considerably in size, returning anywhere between 3 and 16 deputies depending on the department. The remaining 20 seats were filled through a single national constituency, meaning those candidates were chosen on the basis of votes cast across the entire country.

  To stand for election, candidates must meet several constitutional requirements drawn from Article 126. They must be over 25 years old and Salvadoran citizens by birth, born of at least one Salvadoran citizen parent. They must also be recognized as honest and educated, and they cannot have lost their rights as a citizen in the five years before running. El Salvador also sends 20 deputies to the Central American Parliament, a supranational body, also selected through open-list proportional representation from a single national constituency.

• 4. Bukele's Seat Reduction

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  On the 1st of June 2023, President Nayib Bukele sent the Legislative Assembly a formal proposal to shrink the body from 84 seats to 60. The proposal moved quickly. By the 7th of June 2023, the assembly had voted to pass it. The change took effect on the 1st of May 2024, meaning El Salvador's legislature entered that election year operating with a quarter fewer seats than before.

  The results of the 2024 election under the new 60-seat structure show a dramatically consolidated chamber. Bukele's own party, Nuevas Ideas, holds 54 of the 60 seats. The Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as ARENA, holds 2. The National Coalition Party holds another 2. Vamos holds 1, and the Christian Democratic Party holds 1. The concentration of seats in Nuevas Ideas reflects a political landscape where one movement, built around the sitting president, commands an overwhelming legislative majority.

• 5. A Century of Seat Distribution

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  The assembly's membership records from 1928 onward tell a story of shifting coalitions and changing party fortunes across nearly a hundred years. In the elections of 1928 and through much of the 1930s and 1940s, the assembly seated 42 members. That number grew over time, reaching 54 seats by 1952 and holding there for several election cycles.

  By 1964, the distribution shows multiple parties splitting the chamber, a pattern that deepened through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The 1991 election returned results spread across six distinct groupings, reflecting the fragmented party landscape of that period. The 2000s and 2010s saw ARENA and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, among others, trading dominance across successive elections.

  The 2021 election marks a visible turning point in the records: Nuevas Ideas captured 56 seats in that cycle, a number that dwarfed every other party's total. Three years later, with the chamber itself reduced to 60 seats, Nuevas Ideas held 54 of them. The shift from a fragmented legislature of 84 members to a dominant-party chamber of 60 represents one of the most compressed transformations in the assembly's recorded history.