July 20
Nicaragua’s long-serving president Daniel Ortega mentioned the Central American nation will not maintain elections, eliminating the potential for an electoral problem when his time period ends subsequent 12 months and additional entrenching the rule he shares along with his spouse.
Ortega, who has repeatedly held power since 2007 following an earlier presidential time period in the Nineteen Eighties, mentioned the transfer will shut off any path to the opposition, though he didn’t present particulars about finishing up the ban.
“There won’t be any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega mentioned in a speech on Sunday night to commemorate the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which Ortega helped overthrow the US-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship.
“The days when parties backed by the Yankees (United States) and the Somocistas would return to power are over – never again,” he added, in the 80-year-old’s first public look in two months.
The US State Department didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. The Trump administration has described the Ortega authorities as a dictatorship, and imposed sanctions on greater than 2,350 Nicaraguan officers and their kinfolk.
Nicaragua’s final election in 2021 was broadly disputed after Ortega detained opponents and enterprise leaders and criminalized dissent.
Last 12 months, Ortega further consolidated his power through a series of constitutional reforms that included naming his spouse Rosario Murillo as “co-president” and increasing the presidential time period to 6 years. He and his spouse management nearly each facet of the federal government, together with the armed forces and the judiciary.
The UN Human Rights Council has accused Ortega and Murillo’s authorities of reworking the nation “into an authoritarian state” and systematically violating human rights. In 2018, Ortega responded to widespread anti-government protests with a crackdown in which greater than 300 individuals have been killed.
Analysts and opposition politicians in exile mentioned the declaration put into focus the truth of two-person rule underneath the Ortegas, whereas revealing the couple’s worry of an opposition motion taking root.
“Ortega and Murillo are evidently afraid at the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power,” mentioned Tiziano Breda, a senior analyst at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit that tracks political violence. “Instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether.”
The nation has remodeled right into a “full-fledged, family-run dictatorship,” he added.
Felix Maradiaga, a presidential hopeful for the opposition who was jailed in Nicaragua from 2021 to 2023 earlier than being expelled to the US, mentioned he noticed Ortega’s feedback much less as a present of pressure than as “a confession of fear.”
“Ortega publicly acknowledged what has always been his true intention: to prevent his tyrannical project from being subjected to any form of democratic competition,” Maradiaga informed Reuters.
Ortega had already successfully squashed competitors throughout prior reelections of 2011, 2016 and 2021, in response to Salvador Marenco, coordinator of the Costa Rica-based Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective.
And final 12 months’s constitutional reforms had already established a one-party system in a rustic the place opposition leaders not exist, as a result of they’ve been exiled.
Ortega, he mentioned, is attempting to “avoid the risk of an electoral defeat, because he knows that the people reject him.”