Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said on Sunday that Nicaragua will hold no more elections, telling supporters that the move would block the opposition from coming to power. He made the declaration at the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, days after saying the next vote was due next year.
National Assembly laws
Ortega said he would work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on new laws, adding that Nicaragua needed measures that would “build a wall” against the opposition. The political effect is straightforward: the elections were due next year, but Ortega said there would be no more elections at all, leaving open whether the government would formally cancel the vote or use new rules to keep opposition parties off the ballot.
Ortega has led Nicaragua since 2007 and is 80 years old. Last year he pushed through constitutional reforms that extended the presidential term from five to six years and promoted Rosario Murillo from vice-president to co-president, tightening the legal structure around his administration before this latest announcement.
Tiziano Breda on Nicaragua
Tiziano Breda, the Latin America senior analyst at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, said “Ortega and Murillo have sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship.” Breda added that Ortega and Murillo were “evidently afraid of the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power,” and said they had chosen “to eliminate electoral competition altogether.”
The announcement also fits a pattern already visible in 2021, when Ortega’s regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls during the campaign. The 2018 protests were followed by a violent crackdown that killed more than 350 people, wounded hundreds, jailed thousands and forced nearly 1 million Nicaraguans into exile. Ortega’s Sunday speech therefore did not introduce a new dispute over political control; it pushed the same dispute to its furthest point, with the next legal step to be worked out through the National Assembly and the institutions he named.
