“I know whose going to win the election. I even know by how much,” he said as he sipped on a large bowl of meat soup. It was October 22nd, 2011; two weeks before the Nicaraguan Presidential elections. By that point, it wasn't surprising to hear someone claim to know who was going to win (most people, even in the opposition, accepted the undeniable popularity of the incumbent, Daniel Ortega), but it was the first time I’d heard a Nicaraguan say that he knew what the actual results would be. “Ortega will win with at least 56% of the vote,” he said with a picaresque smile.
I didn't know this at the time, but my friend hadn't just picked the 56% mark by chance. It was the percentage the Sandinista party needed to achieve an absolute majority in the National Assembly. (Voters were expected to vote for a Presidential candidate and a representative in the Assembly; but it was widely understood that most voters voted strictly down party lines.) My friend was a Sandinista, but a pragmatic one, well aware of the current power dynamics in his country. Another friend, a more devout old-school Sandinista, had, a year earlier, expressed his concerns about the possibility of a landslide Sandinista victory in the Presidential elections: “I’m going to start to worry if Daniel gets more than 60%,” he had said.
The 2011 Election
Sure enough, on November 6th, Daniel Ortega received 62.46% of the vote. The main opposition party, headed by the aging Fabio Gadea Mantilla, got half of that. A couple of nights later, Daniel Ortega gave a victory speech, where he sounded not like someone who just won a crushing victory, but like a person who had been thrown a surprise party he had known about for months. His speech was not passionate, overjoyed, or even grateful, but a standard Ortega speech: long, unpolished, off the cuff, painfully slow, and chock-full of bewildering tangents. (Ortega’s signature speaking style is that of endless one liners, separated by long pauses, with each new sentence struggling to come out, as if with every new idea he were trying to ignite a old car engine.)
It wasn't just Ortega who wasn't all that shocked by the results. The Constitution, in Article 147 (a), actually prohibits the current president from being re-elected, and also bars any person from being president more than twice (Daniel Ortega had already been president from 1985-1990). So, after Ortega managed to get the Supreme Court of the country—which is controlled by Sandinista justices—to rule that Article 147(a) violated the president’s human rights, thus allowing him to run again, most everyone saw the election results as being foretold. He wouldn't have taken such extreme measures, if he didn't expect to become president again.
Did Ortega win fairly? Not according to the opposition, who refused to accept the results, pointing to a number of supposed obstructions and irregularities. These included claims that official opposition party election monitors were denied access to certain voting booths; that the handing out of ID cards needed for voting was held-up in the case of known opposition voters during the run-up to the election; and that there existed a general campaign of voter intimidation on the part of the ruling party, especially against public employees.
There are, however, two more general and, in my opinion, more stinging critiques of the entire process. The first is the accusation that Ortega has used the vast resources and powers afforded to him by his position to further his presidential campaign. I am guessing the Constitution barred sitting presidents from running for reelection for precisely this reason; now that Ortega got around that ban, people (even supporters) are understandably suspicious. The second critique involves the role of the notorious head of the Supreme Electoral Commission (Consejo Supremo Electoral), Roberto Rivas.
The Electoral Commission is one of the government’s four branches of power, and is designed to independently manage, observe, and validate all local and national elections. Rivas, who has headed the commission since 2000, is reviled by the opposition and is seen, by most everyone, as a Sandinista sympathizer. He became one of the opposition’s main targets soon after the 2008 municipal elections, which people claim was the most extensively documented instance of electoral fraud in the country’s history. The European Union and the United States both withheld financial assistance to the country in response to these fraudulent elections. Rivas’ term finished in 2010, and the Assembly had plans to stall or block his re-nomination, so Ortega signed a decree allowing officials with expired terms to remain in their posts. In the most recent presidential election, the usually reserved head of the EU election monitor team went so far as to censure the conduct of the supposedly independent Roberto Rivas for, among other things, calling the biggest newspaper in the country (which is quite critical of Rivas and Ortega) “trash.” The observation team’s final report noted that the Electoral Commission “demonstrated scant independence from the ruling party and created unequal conditions for competition as well as outright obstructions to the opposition.”
In the immediate aftermath of the election results, the opposition candidate, Fabio Gadea Mantilla, claimed that he and not Daniel Ortega had received more than 60% of the vote. He, therefore, rejected the results and the legitimacy of the elections. Gadea's claim seems laughable. Most polls before the election gave Ortega a pretty sizable advantage (if polls in Nicaragua are to be trusted), and the general consensus was that Ortega had won. When the head of the EU observation team, after complaining of the numerous obstacles to his work and of the opaqueness of the election process, was asked if there had been fraud, he said: for politicians, fraud exists when the loser wins and the winner loses, by that standard there had been no fraud and Ortega was without question the winner.
But if that is the case, then why were EU observation teams blocked from entering certain voting stations? Why all the irregularities? Why all the obstacles? For the answer, we have to back to the 56% mark. Daniel Ortega knew he was going to win, he just wasn't sure he’d get the 56% he needed to control the National Assembly.
Concentration of Power
The election marked an important step in Ortega’s consolidation of power. The National Assembly had been the last government holdout for the opposition. With 62 seats in the Assembly, the Sandinistas now have an absolute majority in that body and can, if they so choose, amend the constitution. The ruling party now controls the executive branch, the legislative branch, the supreme court, and the electoral commission. They have also made inroads with the well respected and fiercely independent army and police force. Ortega’s running-mate in 2011 was the former Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and the current head of the national police remains in power, in spite of her expired term, thanks to the president’s 2009 decree.
Media control has also been a priority for the Ortega clan. Channel 4 is the official Sandinista channel and acts as the unabashed distributor of party propaganda. The tone and coverage is probably not all that different from that of state channels in the former Soviet Union. Programming is devoted to extensive coverage of recreational activities put on by the government for low-income children and things of that nature, followed by interviews with delighted parents who say things like, “None of this would have been possible without the Sandinistas. I would like to personally thank Commandante Daniel Ortega. (Insert party slogan here).”
In the past few years, Ortega’s family has attempted to further infiltrate the televised media market. It has gained control of three additional network channels, which it has used to target the 18-40 demographic (one of the channels specializes in broadcasting American programs popular with young adults, like Family Guy, Dexter, and Californication). The Ortega family also owns half of another channel and has been floating the idea of purchasing a 24 hour news channel. Of the seven network channels available to all Nicaraguans with a television, four are controlled directly by members of Ortega’s family (mostly his children) and a fifth is owned in part by them. In order to get non-Sandinista news programming one must turn either to channel 2 (the most popular opposition channel) or channel 12 (which is probably the least popular channel on non-cable television).
Newspapers are a different story. The award-winning La Prensa, Nicaragua’s most popular paper, is fiercely critical of the current government and tends to editorialize in most of its stories. (Example: when Ortega proudly purchased the country’s first satellite, the front page story of La Prensa was headlined “Satellite Will Not Alleviate Poverty.”) The other newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, leans Sandinista but seems troubled by Ortega’s authoritarian streak. Ortega seems less interested in this medium, but has opportunistically sought a stake when available (as almost occurred recently when El Nuevo Diario was in dire financial straits and the government made an offer; the paper, however, chose another buyer in order to maintain its independence).
Daniel Ortega is in a comfortable political position. He has managed to quietly set his pieces in places where he would achieve almost absolute control of the board. He has done this, masterfully, without very much public backlash or the need for violently repressive acts. The opposition attributes this lack of public outrage to the government hand-outs, which they view, essentially, as hush money (in politics this form of patronage is known as clientelism). Propaganda has also managed to elevate Ortega into a sort of messianic figure. The streets are covered with giant billboards of him waving into the distance, and people have started talking of Danielismo instead of Sandinismo. The idol-worship was evident in his decision to run for another term (his sixth consecutive presidential run), rather than allowing another Sandinista leader take the reins. All in all, Ortega seems bent on permanent and absolute control. (If the Constitution is amended by the Assembly, it will likely be for the benefit of Daniel’s wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the heir apparent. After five years of “co-presidency” with her husband, Murillo has now taken on a bigger public role. She is now the official spokesman for the government, with almost daily half-hour long political sermons on the Channel 4 news and political posters circulating with just her on them. The Constitution would have to be amended for it now bans family members of the current president from running for office.)
The Public Reaction
The next time I saw my friend, who
predicted the 56% victory, he grinned and yelled out, “See! I told you!” People’s reactions to the Sandinista party’s
machinations are varied. There are those
who see it all as just politics as usual: better to laugh about it than to cry.
They tend to throw up their hands in the
air and say with a chuckle, “What can I do about it?” (Both Sandinistas and
oppositions followers fall into this category, although the more they lean
towards the opposition the less good humored they are about the situation.) There
are die-hard opposition party members, who see a Sandinista conspiracy in every
job promotion or demotion, in every government handout, and in every unsolved
murder case. Then there is a segment of
wealthy, young, educated Nicaraguans who are swayed (or manipulated) by the
Sandinistas' progressive rhetoric and feel-good poverty programs (evidence that
the party’s investment into reaching out to young people is working). Other youth with fewer resources are taken in
by the government sponsored sports tournaments, youth groups, and entertainment
activities (like busing school kids to plazas to see the Real Madrid-Barcelona
game on jumbo screens).
When I spoke again to the long-time
Sandinista who had warned me about the dangers of a landslide Ortega victory,
he had tempered his fears. It might have
been the polarization inherent in all election campaigns, but this friend of
mine now beamed with party pride. He
formed part of a segment of the population--those educated die-hard
Sandinistas--who saw their party’s power grabbing maneuvers as standard politicking
and electioneering. It’s not their fault the Sandinistas had
outwitted the opposition in the game of politics. The opposition also tries to control all
branches of government; they just are no good at it! So, their argument goes.
But not all segments of the
population have taken the Sandinistas' actions lying down. In the next post I will look at the violent
public reaction in a few Nicaraguan communities.
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