Opinion / Ed Stocker
Power forward
It’s a story that has repeated itself across Latin America. The regimes might be different – and time in power varies – but the manipulation of democracy is the same. Often, the leaders arrive as a breath of fresh air: the end of an ancien régime dominated by elites with bold promises to do more for society’s downtrodden. Then comes the subsequent refusal to relinquish power.
The case of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega (pictured), however, is unusual. The party he belongs to, the Sandinistas, seized power in the Central American nation in 1979 and he emerged as its leader. A self-declared leftist revolutionary, he subsequently served as president from 1984 to 1990, until he lost an election and left office. Not content with fading quietly into the background, he lost several elections until finally winning in 2006 thanks to a string of savvy political manoeuvres – and he hasn’t relinquished his grip on power since. On Sunday, Ortega will run for his fourth consecutive term, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that now allows re-election, in a poll that is widely seen as a sham. Scores of potential opponents have been arrested since the summer.
Nicaragua is an example of a revolution gone wrong, with increasing authoritarianism stamping out dissent and institutions bending to the president’s will. Some feel that Ortega has recreated some of the hallmarks of the country’s Anastasio Somoza dictatorship that preceded the Sandinistas power grab. For others, he’s more in the vein of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro: seemingly indifferent to the will of the people and relying on repression to survive. Both also lean on their wives for validation: in Maduro’s case, former National Assembly president Cilia Flores and, for Ortega, his vice-president Rosario Murillo. And the similarities don’t end there: just like Venezuela, Nicaragua is an impoverished nation that’s being brought further to its knees by a once-revolutionary leader who needs to realise that it’s time to go.