Nicaragua's Ortega declares end to elections, aims to 'build a wall' against opposition

Nicaragua’s long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, has said the country will hold no further elections to prevent the opposition from coming to power.

The 80-year-old authoritarian leader, who has been in office since 2007, also said he would work with the congress he controls to pass new laws that would “build a wall” against the opposition.

Ortega made the announcement on Sunday during the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which he helped overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

Although his administration and that of his wife and “co-president”, Rosario Murillo, had already been marked by the steady erosion of democracy in the Central American country, many are describing his announcement as a significant rhetorical escalation.

“With this decision, Ortega and Murillo have sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship,” said Tiziano Breda, Latin America senior analyst at the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data.

During a speech in front of thousands of state employees who, according to local media, had been coerced into attending, Ortega said: “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition parties] can try to seize the government, seize power.”

The president, who had not appeared in public for 61 days, 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.”

The elections were due to take place next year, but Ortega gave no details on whether they would be cancelled or whether the opposition would be barred from taking part – something that has already happened in practice. During the 2021 campaign, his regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls.

Breda said: “Ortega and Murillo are evidently afraid of the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power, possibly suggesting that their already feeble domestic support is further falling.

“Therefore, instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether.”

Last year, Ortega pushed through a series of constitutional reforms that included extending the presidential term from five to six years and promoting his wife, then vice-president, to the position of “co-president”. The US refers to their administration as the “Murillo-Ortega dictatorship”.

During his speech, the Nicaraguan president criticised the US over the January operation that abducted the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro: “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.”

The president said preventing the opposition from returning to power was necessary to protect the country from the “coup plotters” who, he claimed, had been behind the nationwide protests of 2018 – when, according to organisations including the UN, his regime carried out a violent crackdown that killed more than 350 people, wounded hundreds, jailed thousands and forced nearly 1 million Nicaraguans into exile.

Recently, the UN, the US, human rights organisations and 30 former Ibero-American presidents have directly blamed Ortega and Murillo for the death of the Indigenous leader and four-term congressman Brooklyn Rivera, 73, who spent nearly three years “unjustly imprisoned” by the regime, the US state department said.

According to organisations including Human Rights Watch, there are about 50 political prisoners in the country. The regime has stripped 546 people of their citizenship and shut down more than 5,600 non-governmental organisations, 29 universities and 58 media outlets.