El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been ousted from office, unseated in the recent presidential election by an ambitious young millionaire who claims to transcend partisan politics. After two consecutive terms in the presidency, the former Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army won a distant third-place in the vote on February 3, trailing both the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, which governed from 1989 to 2009, and the election’s insurgent victor, Nayib Bukele.

According to the preliminary results, Bukele swept the election with 1,388,009 votes, 53 percent of the vote. ARENA, in coalition with smaller right-wing parties, took 31.8 percent, and the FMLN a dismal 14.4 percent. The leftist party received even fewer votes than in the recent midterms, and over a million fewer than in the 2014 presidential race. The election saw about 50 percent turnout, significantly lower than previous presidential votes, suggesting that while many former FMLN supporters defected to Bukele, others did not vote at all.

The FMLN’s resounding defeat, though painful, was not unforeseen, coming after massive midterm losses in March 2018 and amid a broader left retreat in Latin America. Since the fall of commodity prices in 2014, left and center-left administrations in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil that depended on extractive rents have been swept out of office, with Venezuela and Nicaragua in the crosshairs: president-elect Bukele has called Nicolas Maduro and Daniel Ortega both dictators, and will likely prove an eager ally in the US’s right-wing crusade in the region.