Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega said on Sunday that Nicaragua will hold no further elections. He said the move was meant to stop the opposition from seizing power.
Ortega made the announcement during the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. Elections had been due next year, and Ortega said he would work with the National Assembly and relevant institutions on new laws.
Ortega and the National Assembly
Ortega said, “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition parties] can try to seize the government, seize power.” He added, “We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country.”
That leaves a basic legal question at the center of the announcement: whether Nicaragua is moving to formally cancel the vote or to keep elections on paper while closing them off to the opposition. Ortega did not spell out the mechanics, but his language points to a system built to block participation before ballots are cast.
2021 campaign in Nicaragua
The step fits a pattern that was already visible in the 2021 campaign, when Ortega's regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls. Last year, Ortega pushed through constitutional reforms that extended the presidential term from five to six years and promoted Rosario Murillo from vice-president to co-president.
Tiziano Breda, a Latin America senior analyst at the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, said Ortega and Murillo have sealed Nicaragua's transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship. The US calls the administration the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship, and Ortega has already been in office since 2007.
2018 protests and exile
The crackdown has a wider record behind it. After the 2018 protests, a violent response killed more than 350 people, wounded hundreds, jailed thousands and forced nearly 1 million Nicaraguans into exile.
Ortega also criticized the US over the January operation that abducted Nicolás Maduro. In that speech, he said, “With all their power, they stormed the presidential palace, where Nicolás and his wife, Cilia [Flores], were. They killed the entire security detail there – most of them were Cubans – and took them away to imprison them in the US. It is monstrous.”
For now, the most immediate consequence is political rather than procedural: opposition parties face a move designed to keep them out before the next election cycle can begin. The next test is whether Ortega's promised laws appear as a formal rewrite of Nicaragua's electoral rules or as another layer of exclusion inside the existing system.
