EL SALVADOR — Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele issued a post on X this weekend to voice his concerns over recent riots in France. Bukele assured that France is not “finished,” adding that he could restore order to the European nation in “one week.”

The post, published on Sunday and written in French, answered those who say France is beyond saving. Bukele wrote, “I’ve heard it said that France is finished, that it’s too late to save her,” reminding people that “France remains just as beautiful, enviable even. Her greatness hasn’t vanished; it only awaits rebirth.”

Bukele said El Salvador “overcome, in a single year, a problem a hundred times more severe, without having the resources at France’s disposal.” Bukele added that the nation “could manage it in a week.”

France in Turmoil

The post followed days of nationwide protests across the country. Demonstrations that initially began as grievances over the state of the French public school system, underfunding and over-crowding, eventually dissolves into chaos, looting and rioting across major French cities.

Credit: Getty Images

The Interior Ministry counted about 550,000 participants and organizers about 800,000. AFP and AP reported at least 2,400 arrests, thousands of business destroyed, and 1,000 police injured.

Fires and looting hit Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux, and the city hall in Limoges was burned. Authorities blamed radical far-left groups.

The Message Underneath: the Salvadoran Model

Bukele was not offering generic sympathy. The post is a short pitch for what he considers his signature achievement, the restoration of order in a country once ranked among the world’s most violent.

The centerpiece is the state of exception, in force since March 2022. It suspended certain constitutional guarantees and allowed arrests without warrants.

Defense Minister René Merino reported 84,260 people captured between March 2022 and the end of 2024, and the regime has since been extended repeatedly.

The result, by official figures, is a collapse in killings. A nation that has undergone a total transformation where its homicide has decreased to 1.3 per 100,000, a 32% drop from 2024, and an even steeper drop from rates that were among the highest in the world less than a decade ago.

That was the lowest rate of any country in its survey, below Argentina and Chile, against a regional median of about 17.6.

Bukele has made the “safest country” claim a cornerstone of his political brand, and it has won him enormous domestic popularity.

Inmates during a security operation under the watch of police at the Izalco prison in San Salvador, El Salvador. Photo: Handout/El Salvador President Press Office/AP

The crackdown has come at a price, according to human rights groups who claim killings of alleged gang members by police and deaths in prisons.

Bukele has been marketing his approach abroad. In 2024 he offered to help Haiti, and Salvadoran troops are now deployed there with the Gang Suppression Force. His message to France fits that pattern, presenting El Salvador as a template.

The comparison has limits, however. El Salvador’s problem was entrenched gangs controlling large parts of Salvadoran territory. France on the other hand, faces mass street protests and a wave of looting, an issue a democracy of its size would have to handle with policing, courts and the political will power to address both underfunding in public schools and uncontrolled urban rioting and violence in French streets.