Nicaragua will hold its first general elections next Sunday, November 7 after the protests that broke out in April 2018 against the government chaired by Sandinista Daniel Ortega, who along with his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, are seeking a new reelection.
About 4.4 million Nicaraguans 90 deputies before the National Assembly, and 20 before the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) are called to go to the polls to elect the president and vice president of the Republic.
Those elections will take place amid the arrest of nearly forty opposition leaders, businessmen, peasants, students and independent professionals, including seven who wanted to compete with Ortega for the head of state.
What’s more, without the participation of three opposition political parties, the outlawing of more than 50 NGOs, with more than 150 “political prisoners”, with tens of thousands of Nicaraguans who have gone into exile for security or economic reasons, and with the police occupation of the influential newspaper La Prensa that stopped circulate in its printed version.
On May 30, 2018, thousands of people participated in the “March of the Mothers” against the government of Daniel Ortega. Photo EFE
A police state
The process has been questioned by the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Union (EU), and organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as well as by the Nicaraguan opposition excluded from the competition.
It is the first general elections since the popular revolt that broke out in 2018 for some controversial reforms to social security and that later became a demand for the resignation of President Ortega, because he responded with force.
The protests, described by the Executive as an attempted coup, they left at least 328 deadAccording to the IACHR, although local organizations raise the figure to 684 and the Government recognizes 200.
The anti-government demonstrations, according to the IACHR, were repressed through the use of lethal force by police and vigilante groups under the command of the presidency, as their Supreme Chief.
Protesters at a barricade made of cobblestones in the city of Masaya (Nicaragua), in May 2018. Photo EFE
Since then, according to that autonomous body of the OAS, the State of Nicaragua, under tight control of the Sandinistas, has established a police state to silence dissent and close democratic spaces.
Among others, it has arbitrarily detained and deprived the freedom of people considered to be opponents, classified public demonstrations as illegal, and has raided and taken by force the facilities of human rights organizations and independent media, he said.
Additionally, the National Assembly, in full alignment with the Executive, approved a set of laws that would have the effect of further closing democratic spaces and restricting the freedom of expression of dissident voices, he said.
All the power of Ortega
In a report entitled “Nicaragua: Concentration of Power and Weakening of the Rule of Law”, the IACHR considered that this set of actions promoted after the protests of April 2018 had the purpose of preventing the participation of the opposition in the elections, ” leaving Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in the electoral round free of competition “.
Therefore, according to the IACHR, the elections in Nicaragua occur “in this climate of repression and closure of democratic spaces,” in which Ortega seeks “perpetuation in power indefinitely and maintain privileges and immunities, in a context of repression, corruption, electoral fraud and structural impunity “.
“The great challenge is to find formulas with the participation of civil society in order to restore democratic guarantees and freedoms characteristic of a democratic State of Rights through the separation of powers, as well as guaranteeing the conditions for the holding of fair, free and transparent elections, “he noted.
For the Nicaraguan observatory Urnas Abiertas, Ortega is seeking his third consecutive reelection with “a malicious plan to end democracy.”
“Untenable”
For his part, the analyst for Central America of the International Crisis Group, Tiziano Breda, told Efe that the prolongation of the crisis in Nicaragua will have domestic and international effects.
At the domestic level, it will deepen the social and political cracks that opened or reopened in 2018, “with the risk that tensions resume in the form of demonstrations or acts of political intolerance, “he said.
In addition, a non-competitive or transparent election would give birth to a government with little legitimacy, making it difficult to access international resources and investments, and thus accentuating the economic difficulties of Nicaragua, causing a subsequent increase in regional emigration and even to the United States, he warned.
For the analyst, the situation in Nicaragua is unsustainable in the medium and long term, and although Ortega knows them, “it seems that, for him, survival in power surpasses any calculation of political stability“.
Source: EFE
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