Bukele was re-elected as President of El Salvador and stated that he would continue the policy of introducing Bitcoin.
What if Bukele isn't reelected? This only means that there can be new sets of policies towards the country's status about having Bitcoin as a legal tender.
But he was re-elected. What are you asking? What if he had not been re-elected? You are presuming what if reality was not real. What if the opposition took over? It is not as easy for the opposition to take over when Bukele has such high approval levels, so maybe you are asking what if Bukele was not so popular?
In regards to bitcoin, what if the country changes its mind about bitcoin because some leader other than Bukele were to come to power? What if there were a coup d'éat?
We likely need more details regarding some kind of a factual scenario to help you to reach some of your presumptions that some kind of event in which Bukele were to not come to power than there would be a sliding off of the desire for Bitcoin as legal tender.. so some how bitcoin would also need to be blamed for some issue.. .maybe if the bitcoin disappeared or maybe some other corruption were to be discovered in the administration.. but we still would need more context for your fantastical "what ifs?"
It is still difficult to talk about the success of Bitcoin in El Salvador, because according to surveys in 2023, the use of Bitcoin by the population has decreased significantly to 12%, compared to 2022 when this figure exceeded 24%.
This is not surprising because still many of their residents don't have an idea or doesn't like using it as a legal tender.
Right now the dollar and bitcoin are both legal tender, and so residents can use either one, and there were some provisions that merchants would have to accept it; however, from what I heard, there are still a decent number of residents that are still not set up for accepting bitcoin, and also I am pretty sure that the El Salvador said that it is not prosecuting merchants for not being set up, even though it would seem that if the merchant is really BIG then they should have to have the capability of accepting bitcoin.. so I am not sure if they are never going to not enforce those kinds of issues. Maybe we need more investigation into those parts?
It seems that initially many of us thought that they would be using lightning network to spend, but a lot of the lightning network involves various custodial solutions, so there are not very many non-custodial (or self-custodial) lightning solutions, even in the last couple of years. On chain transaction fees have not been helping the ability to transact with small items using bitcoin, and surely some folks are reluctant to spend their bitcoin, even though if tourists are coming in, then they might not be reluctant to spend their bitcoin, especially if they have had bitcoin for a long time, but still it seems that due to relatively low BTC prices (spending a lot of time below the 200-week moving average) a lot of bitcoiners might have been reluctant to spend their bitcoin between May 2022 and October 2023.. so there could have been some resistance to spending during that pretty long period of low BTC prices.
I understand that Bukele is trying in every possible way to introduce Bitcoin, but this survey shows us that for the population, payments in Bitcoin are not so convenient that its use is growing among the population, in fact, we see the opposite situation when these indicators are declining.
That's sad but it's the reality.
I would imagine that success or progress could be measured from a lot of kinds of indicators besides ONLY whether BTC is being transacted within the country, and so if there might be various kinds of infrastructure building that is going on to improve cell service and the availability of various kinds of technology, then at least the excuse of lack of technology might not be focused upon... At the same time, in some countries there are accounting and tax consequences, but El Salvador does not have that issue and it does not have the issue of administrative hostility, and perhaps the administration is trying to encourage and educate people about the various ways that they would be able to use bitcoin.
I doubt that El Salvador is considering it nearly 2.5 year roll out of bitcoin to have had been a failure, even if there might be some areas in which it is appearing that adoption and usage of bitcoin is still not rising to very high levels... but then now with Bukele's election to another 5 year term, we may well be able to see how bitcoin adoption progresses in El Salvador during that time - presuming that Bukele stays in power for the next 5 years. ..that would be bringing us into 2029.