Few incidents, low turnout as Nicaragua votes
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega sought a fourth consecutive term in elections Sunday against a field of little-known candidates while those who could have given him a real challenge sat in jail.
Voting was orderly and speedy as voters noted the absence of long lines at more than 13,000 polling places around the country. Voting closed Sunday evening without reported incidents. But U.S. President
Joe Biden strongly criticized the vote as a “pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.”
The run-up to the vote was more eventful. The opposition denounced more arrests of its leaders and activists around the country on the eve of the election. On Sunday, Ortega railed against alleged interference from the U.S.
The opposition had called on Nicaraguans to stay home in protest of an electoral process that has been roundly criticized as not credible by foreign powers.
The election will determine who holds the presidency for the next five years, as well as 90 of the 92 seats in the congress and Nicaragua’s representation in the Central American Parliament.
More than 4.4 million Nicaraguan age 16 and above were eligible to vote.
Ortega’s Sandinista Front and its allies control the congress and all government institutions. Ortega first served as president from 1985-90, before returning to power in 2007. He recently declared his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, his “co-president.”
POTENTIAL CHALLENGERS ARRESTED
In June, police arrested seven potential presidential challengers on charges that essentially amount to treason. They remained in detention on election day. Some two dozen other opposition leaders were also swept up ahead of the elections.
The other contenders on Sunday’s ballot were little known politicians from minor parties seen as friendly with Ortega’s Sandinista Front.
On Saturday, the Blue and White National Union, an opposition alliance, issued an alert after at least eight of its leaders were “abducted by the regime in illegal raids” Saturday afternoon and evening.
The Civic Alliance, another opposition coalition, reported “harassment, surveillance, intimidation, assault, attacks, illegal and arbitrary detentions” of some of its leaders around Nicaragua.
The heads of the police and army said the vote was occurring without incident.
Voting through the morning appeared to be calm and without long lines.
Voter Mayela Rodriguez found her local voting center at a school in Managua virtually empty. “In past years it was really full,” she said. “Before you had to [wait] in a big line to come here and now, empty.”
Around midday, Ortega spoke live on television after voting — he held up his inked finger.
He blasted the United States for interference in Nicaragua, noted there had been alleged fraud in the last U.S. election, reminded that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol were called terrorists and remain jailed. Ortega repeated his claim that the U.S. government supported huge protests in Nicaragua in April 2018, which he has called an attempted coup.
“They have as much right as we do to open trials against terrorists,” he said.
“The immense majority of Nicaraguans are voting for peace and not for war or terrorism,” he said.
BIDEN: PROCESS ‘RIGGED’
In a statement released around the close of voting, Biden called the process “rigged” and said the U.S. would use the tools at its disposal to hold the Nicaraguan government accountable.
“The Ortega and Murillo family now rule Nicaragua as autocrats, no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago,” Biden said.
One of the first to vote Sunday was Foreign Minister Denis Moncada at a secondary school in the capital. “The majority of Nicaraguans are going to elect today Commander Daniel [Ortega], comrade Rosario [Murillo] and the deputies,” Moncada said to pro-government news outlets.
He said the peaceful vote sends a message to the world powers that “Nicaraguans are dignified patriots and we are not going to bend to their threats, sanctions and nonrecognition of the elections.”
Presidential candidate Guillermo Osorno of the small Christian Path party voted early Sunday. He promised that if he defeated Ortega he would “change the electoral system” and allow election observers.
Meanwhile in Costa Rica, hundreds of Nicaraguans living in exile there protested against Ortega’s government.
With little doubt as to the presidential election result, focus is already turning to what the international response will be as Ortega seeks to tighten his grip on power.
On Friday, a senior U.S. State Department official, who spoke with reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government was willing to consider additional targeted sanctions, but had tried to avoid measures that would more broadly impact the Nicaraguan people.