President Ortega of Nicaragua announces there will be ‘no more elections’

By Vatican News

The first signs came last year, when President Daniel Ortega introduced a series of constitutional reforms that, among other measures, made his wife, Rosario Murillo, “co-president” and extended the presidential term to six years.

Now comes confirmation of his intention to keep his hold on power with last Sunday’s announcement, made during the celebrations for the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, that there will be no more elections allowing his opponents to attempt to take control of the government.

Repression after the 2021 election

The move by the 80-year-old president, who has remained continuously in power since 2007 following an earlier presidential term in the 1980s, would effectively eliminate any remaining space for the opposition, although he did not explain how elections would be formally abolished. The announcement comes ahead of the next election, originally scheduled for November 2027.

The most recent elections, held in 2021, were widely disputed after Ortega ordered the arrest of opposition figures and members of the business community and crushed dissent.

Human rights organizations strongly condemned the announcement.

According to Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a candidate in the 2021 election who remained imprisoned until his release to the United States in 2023 together with more than 200 other political prisoners, the move confirms a long-standing plan to concentrate power in the hands of the Sandinista party.

Political prisoners

According to the Mechanism for Recognition of Political Prisoners, an organization that operates largely from exile and documents cases of politically motivated detention in Nicaragua, at least 46 people are currently being held for political reasons.

Following the U.S. operation in Venezuela that in January led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Nicaraguan government announced that it would release additional dissidents.

Since 2018, Nicaragua has shut down more than 5,000 organizations, most of them religious, forcing thousands of people to leave the country.

At the beginning of July, the Ortega-Murillo government revoked the professional licenses of a large number of lawyers, in what United Nations experts described as a full-scale purge of the legal profession.