Caribbean & Central America - June 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

At the start of this month, President Daniel Ortega officially launched his presidential re-election bid for the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) ahead of 6 November general elections in which he is widely expected to secure a third consecutive term. The previous month, the Coalición Nacional por la Democracia (CND), the fractious opposition’s latest attempt to unite against the FSLN, unveiled as its presidential candidate, Luis Roberto Callejas, a national deputy for the coalition’s biggest member, Partido Liberal Independiente (PLI). As with other recent elections, the opposition’s main concern and campaigning focus is the lack of transparency surrounding the electoral process. A ruling by the supreme justice court (CSJ) stripping Eduardo Montealegre of PLI leadership (see sidebar), together with President Ortega’s refusal to invite international observers, is doing little to assuage these fears.

TSE calls the vote

In a press conference held on 6 May to formally call the election, TSE president Roberto Rivas – who has been in the post since 2000 – omitted mention of any plans to invite international electoral observer missions. Instead, he pointed to the academic credentials of “electoral specialists” from several Latin American countries who would oversee the process.

As well as prompting a response from the CND, the decision not to invite international electoral observers also attracted attention from the US whose ambassador, Laura Dogu, has repeatedly called for international observers to oversee the vote. In a daily press briefing on 19 May, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said “As we’ve said and made clear, allowing internationally recognized election observers to freely monitor elections will only strengthen Nicaragua. We urge the Nicaraguan Government to issue a timely invitation to credible international observation missions.” In a 7 June statement, the US-based Carter Center, which observed four elections in Nicaragua between 1990 and 2006, “lament[ed] this decision to ignore a key component of Nicaragua's own electoral law”, describing it as “an attack on the international community”.

The CND, which comprises the PLI; the dissident Sandinista party, Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS); and other small parties like the Partido Social Cristiano (PSC), has also flagged up other electoral-related concerns, not least the CSE’s electoral calendar which omits mention of the publication of electoral rules, regulations, or manuals to direct the process. Calling for the “rules of the game” to be made public so that the CSE cannot release them “arbitrarily”, the opposition coalition sent a letter on 23 May to Luis Almagro, the general secretary of the Organization of American States (OAS), outlining doubts about the electoral process.

These concerns also featured in the reasons given by the CND’s first choice of presidential candidate, businessman and radio personality Fabio Gadea, for declining the opposition coalition’s offer to run in the election. In a public letter dated 7 April, Gadea, who is 84 and stood in the last (2011) general elections for the PLI, taking 31% of the vote to 62% for Ortega, attributed his decision to the fact that the multiple concerns flagged up by international observer missions sent by the OAS and the European Union (EU) in relation to the 2011 election, had yet to result in any significant changes in the CSE.

Meanwhile, the latest polls present a dismal picture for the CND, which on 2 June unveiled Violeta Granera, the leader of the civil-society grouping Movimiento por Nicaragua (MpN), as Callejas’s presidential running mate. A survey by M&R Consultores, published in the investigative daily Confidencial on 13 May, gave the FSLN – which has yet to unveil Ortega’s running mate – 63.7% of voting intentions to just 5% for the PLI while 24% of respondents refused to say how they would vote. In the 2011 elections, the FSLN won 62 seats in the 92-member unicameral national legislature, up from 38 in 2006, while the PLI won 26 and the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) of disgraced former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002) took just two.

• Move against Montealegre

On 8 June, the constitutional chamber of Nicaragua’s supreme justice court (CSJ) issued a ruling stripping Eduardo Montealegre of leadership of Partido Liberal Independiente (PLI), the main party in the opposition coalition Coalición Nacional por la Democracia (CND). The CSJ, which also announced that the PLI’s new leader was Pedro Reyes Vallejos, maintains that it was ruling on a dispute dating back to 2011 between various PLI factions – one of which was headed up by Reyes. The ruling against Montealegre provoked outrage from local human-rights groups like Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (Cenidh) and the main private sector lobby, Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada (Cosep), whose president, José Adán Aguerri, warned that it could result in “instability” and have repercussions for multilateral institutions.