Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega to compete in his seventh straight presidential election.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
With just five months to go before Nicaragua's next general election, key details of the contest--including when it will be held, and who will compete--are only now coming into focus after a long and unusual period of uncertainty that left some observers wondering if President Daniel Ortega had a surprise power play up his sleeve.
Typically, the Consejo Supremo Electoral (CSE), the country's top electoral authority, officially announces a given election a year in advance, giving participating parties plenty of time to prepare their platforms and preferred candidates. For this year's general election, however, the de facto deadline (November 2015) came and went with no word from the CSE. Several more months went by and still the authority kept quiet, prompting some to question whether there would be elections at all, or whether Ortega, now in his 10th consecutive year as president and 15th overall, was perhaps plotting moves to reshape the entire structure of government.
The CSE ended the ambiguity with an announcement, on May 6, that finally made the elections official. The contests will take place Nov. 6, and will be open to all citizens over the age of 16, CSE head Roberto Rivas, a close Ortega ally, explained. Voters will elect a president and vice president; 90 members of the Asamblea Nacional (AN), Nicaragua's unicameral legislature; and 20 representatives for PARLACEN, a Central American regional parliament. Rivas offered no explanation for the CSE's delay in announcing the contest other than to say that the time frame chosen in this case technically adheres to the law.
In retrospect, speculation about a possible hidden agenda on the part of the president--that he planned to replace Nicaragua's presidential system, for example, with a more parliamentary one--may seem a bit alarmist. Critics can be forgiven, however, for being wary of the wily leader, given his proven record of game-altering political maneuvers.
More than a decade ago, he helped orchestrate a change to the electoral law that allowed him, in 2006, to win the presidency in a single round and with just 38% of the vote (NotiCen, Nov. 9, 2006).
In the run-up to the 2011 election, Ortega used his considerable influence over the CSE and the Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ) to sidestep a term-limit law that prohibited immediate reelection and capped at two the total number of times a president could serve (NotiCen, May 26, 2011). And in early 2014, the powerful president...
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