Evictions, broken laws and timely deaths: Daniel Ortega’s grim road to be the only presidential candidate in the history of Sandinism

At 75 years old and practically confined to his home, Daniel Ortega is campaigning for the eighth time. Since 1984, he has been the only presidential candidate presented by the Sandinista Front, a party that seized power in Nicaragua in July 1979 at the head of an armed revolution.

To stay on the ballot eight times, four of which he managed to be president of the country, Ortega traveled a journey that included, among other things, the elimination of the primary elections in his party, the expulsion of co-religionists who wanted to contest his candidacy, a pact for the sharing of power with a political opponent, the violation of an express constitutional ban and to benefit from the strange death of ‘a candidate for four months of the elections which allowed him to return to power.

Until 1984, Nicaragua was administered, in theory, by a Board of Directors, although the real power resided in the nine commanders who made up the Dominion Command. Daniel Ortega was one of these commanders and the coordinator of the Council. From this position, it was considered “natural” that he was chosen as the presidential candidate when the revolutionary government decided to open elections in search of legitimacy in the midst of a bloody war.

However, behind the scenes there was a power struggle between the commanders. Ortega obtains majority support from the Dominion Command to block Tomás Borge, a commander with “more fangs” who has expressed interest in being the Sandinista presidential candidate. Ortega makes a formula with the writer Sergio Ramírez Mercado and they get 67% of the votes in these elections.

In 1990, in elections brought forward by the pressures of war, Ortega and Ramírez again stood as presidential and vice-presidential candidates, respectively, for the Sandinista Front. On this occasion, surprisingly, lose to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro which obtains 54.74% of the vote. Ortega reaches 40.82 percent. This defeat sounded the death knell for the Sandinista revolution.

Two more successive defeats followed, in 1996 and 2001. The Sandinista Front continued to keep Ortega at the ballot box amid a fierce internal battle for leadership, which led in 1995 to the division of the party and to establishment of primary elections in order to democratize the choice of candidates and allay discontent.

In 1995, human rights defender Vilma Núñez and Álvaro Ramírez competed with Daniel Ortega for the presidential candidacy. Ortega wins by a wide margin. In 2001, two other candidates presented themselves – Victor Hugo Tinoco and Alejandro Martínez Cuenca – contesting the Sandinista representation of Ortega. Ortega wins again.

However, for 2005, things get complicated for Daniel Ortega because he appears on stage Herty lewis, “El Tigre Judío”, a charismatic Sandinista veteran, personal friend of Ortega, who has come from a successful term as mayor of Managua, and decides to compete against Ortega for the presidential candidacy of the Sandinista Front. Again, Víctor Hugo Tinoco (current political prisoner) and Alejandro Martínez Cuenca are also entered in the primaries that year.

The primary elections worked well in the Sandinista Front while Ortega was sure of his victory. The possibility of losing to a more popular character forces him to take the fang out of the uncompetitive nature that has characterized him ever since. The Sandinista Congress, dominated by its close group, decides to eliminate the primary elections and to expel Lewites and Tinoco from the party. Daniel Ortega is proclaimed candidate for the fifth time.

“Congress has made its decision,” Ortega would say. “The truth is that the primaries cause a lot of problems because of the enormous wear and tear they cause in the Sandinistas. Why are we going to burn out and waste time in elections, where ultimately those who ask for them do not recognize the results? We are a party that has its rules ”.

But the threats against Ortega would not end there. Herty Lewites was welcomed as a presidential candidate in the 2006 elections by the Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS) founded by the dissidents who separated from the Sandinista Front in 1995. Lewites was quite a character: joker, dancer, it was easy to see it. in full dress at a millionaires’ table or eat from the hand, make jokes, on the bench of a popular market.

On July 2, 2006, Lewites died of a heart attack shortly after undergoing minor surgery. He died in the middle of the political campaign, just four months before the elections in which Daniel Ortega returned to power. His sudden death sparked all kinds of suspicion and speculation. No autopsy was performed at the request of his wife.

Three days before his death, pollster Cid Gallup published an opinion poll that gave 23% of the voting intentions to Daniel Ortega, 17% to liberal Eduardo Montealegre, 15% to Lewites and 11% to José Rizo, another candidate. liberal. Lewites’ participation would have forced a second electoral round, which the law instituted at the time for percentages below 35% of the vote. And in a second round, by all calculations, Daniel Ortega could not win, because the anti-Sandinista vote was grouped, which was divided.

Nowadays, the Lewites family are still awaiting an investigation to dispel the doubts that exist about the death of Herty Lewites.

Daniel Ortega won the 2006 elections with 38.07% of the vote. This victory was the harvest of a somewhat gruesome play that he had made years ago. In 1998, when the Sandinista Front was going through its lowest hours, Ortega made a pact with Liberal Governor Arnoldo Alemán in which they agreed to divide the country, “one position for you and another for me”, and to make mutual concessions in order to preserve the two as the main political forces in Nicaragua. One of these concessions fuWe lower the electoral ceiling necessary to win in the first round to 35% of the 45 established, a threshold that Ortega was unable to reach.

With the return to power in 2007, however, he found a constitutional double lock prohibiting consecutive re-election, which was his case, and he established that no one could be president more than twice, which was also his case. A judgment of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, composed only of Sandinista magistrates, annulled in October 2009 the constitutional ban on the grounds that it violated the rights of Ortega, by contradicting the principle of equality that the same Constitution established elsewhere.

In this way, he was able to participate in his sixth campaign as a candidate, and with a fully controlled Supreme Electoral Council, he managed to be re-elected and enough MPs to reform the Constitution in 2013 and an indefinite re-election took place. been established.

“Daniel Ortega never believed in democracy”says Nicaraguan political scientist Eliseo Núñez. “He sees in it a phenomenon that, what he calls, bourgeois society has imposed itself as a method of selecting candidates.

He says that Ortega’s leadership stems from the “circumstances of the war”, in part one, and after the 1990 electoral defeat Ortega appeared “as a refuge” for the Sandinista militancy who felt abandoned during this period. .

“All this served to induct a family dynasty very far from the programmatic proposal they had at the start, but close to the same model of the eighties,” he says. “He has never changed, he has always been an authoritarian, totalitarian model, only that before it was party totalitarianism and now it is family totalitarianism.”

For Edgard Parrales, a Sandinista veteran who served as Nicaraguan Ambassador to the OAS in the 1980s, “Ortega has a messianic vision of himself, he thinks he is an indispensable person to oppose imperialism, to democracy.”

He agrees with Núñez that for Ortega democracy is an obstacle. “What happens is that at one point he had to hide. He is no longer hiding,” he says.

For this election campaign, the eighth of his life, Ortega no longer leaves his house to win votes as before. In the few public appearances he has, we see him walking with difficulty. He did not even appear to apply on Monday like the rest of the candidates, but sent his legal representative. With an electoral tribunal made up entirely of his loyalists and with the top seven opposition candidates in prison, he doesn’t need to campaign to fulfill his fifth presidential term.

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