Bitcoin president Nayib Bukele’s popularity soars in El Salvador

Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele remains extremely popular in the Central American nation, despite little apparent enthusiasm for the leader’s Bitcoin experiment.

Daily newspaper La Prensa Gráfica this week published the leader’s latest approval ratings: 91.9% of those surveyed approve of the president.

According to the survey, which quizzed 1,200 Salvadorans, 62.8% said they really approve of what the leader is doing in the country, while a total of 1.8% really disapprove of Bukele’s job so far.

“So now they’re 1.8%?” Bukele, known for his sarcastic comments on social media, wrote on X.

But when it comes to Bitcoin, Salvadorans don’t seem enthused. The survey added that 2.2% of those interviewed say Bitcoin was the biggest failure of Bukele during his six years as president. Bitcoin wasn’t mentioned elsewhere in the poll.

The Salvadoran government’s press office did not respond to questions from DL News.

Bitcoin law

President Bukele took office in 2019 on a ticket to reduce corruption and crime in the country — once the most murderous place in the Western Hemisphere.

And it appears to have worked: homicides have been slashed since Bukele launched a tough crackdown and built a mega-prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in the tiny country.

This week’s approval ratings show that the biggest reason Salvadorans approve of Bukele is because of the improved security situation.

The president also in 2021 debuted a Bitcoin law, encouraging citizens to spend cryptocurrency and asking businesses to accept the digital coin if they had the technological means to do so.

Though even Bukele admitted in a 2024 interview with TIME that the experiment — other than attracting the ire of major institutions like the International Monetary Fund — didn’t get the “widespread adoption we hoped for.”

Still stacking sats

Despite striking a deal with the IMF to scale back its Bitcoin experiment, El Salvador claims it is still buying one Bitcoin per day since it came up with the plan in 2022.

Bukele even said last year on X in an apparent reference to the IMF deal that his Bitcoin buys “won’t stop now” and “won’t stop in the future.”

The country’s crypto coffers can be tracked on the Salvadoran Bitcoin Office website, which show the nation is still apparently upping its digital asset holdings.

As long as Bukele’s ratings remain this high, it’s likely he’ll push ahead with his crypto ambitions unabated.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.