Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega won re-election with 75 percent of votes, according to official partial results announced yesterday, securing a fourth consecutive five-year term for the long-time president.
The announcement came as votes in 49 percent of the Central American nation’s polling stations were counted, said the electoral council, which put participation at 65.34 percent.
Polling stations closed at 6pm on Sunday after 11 hours of voting under the watchful eye of 30,000 police and soldiers maintaining what right groups described as a climate of fear.
Photo: EPA-EFE
With seven would-be presidential challengers detained since June, 75-year-old Ortega was assured a fourth term — his fifth overall — with his wife, Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo, 70, by his side.
Ortega faced five presidential contenders, but in name only — all have been dismissed as regime collaborators.
The opposition said the vote was marked by mass abstention even as the government claimed a high turnout.
US President Joe Biden said in a statement that the outcome was “rigged” long before Sunday’s “sham” election.
“What Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, orchestrated today was a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic,” Biden said, adding that the pair now run Nicaragua “as autocrats.”
Former guerrilla hero Ortega launched a new attack on his opponents on Sunday, saying: “This day we are standing up to those who promote terrorism, finance war, to those who sow terror, death.”
He was referring to Nicaraguans who took part in massive protests against his government in 2018, which were met with a violent crackdown that claimed more than 300 lives.
About 150 people have been jailed since then, including 39 opposition figures rounded up since June in the run-up to Sunday’s vote.
Another roughly 100,000 Nicaraguans have fled into exile.
“They did not want these elections to take place,” Ortega said, branding his opponents “terrorists” and “demons who do not want peace.”
Fear vied with apathy among the 4.4 million Nicaraguans eligible to cast votes in the country of 6.5 million.
“No one from my family went to vote. This was a mockery for Nicaraguans,” said a 49-year-old woman who runs a grocery store.
Like many others, she was too scared to give her name.
Short lines of voters wearing masks could be seen at some of the 13,459 polling stations, but many were empty when reporters visited.
At one of them, Pablo de Jesus Rodriguez, a 26-year-old carpenter and bricklayer, said: “The president has done good things for our country,” as he cast his vote.
Members of Ortega’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front went from house to house calling citizens to the ballot box.
The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights said Nicaragua was a “police state” using tactics of “fear [and] social control” to “crush the opposition.”
There were protests on Sunday in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Spain and the US — countries that are home to thousands of Nicaraguan exiles.
“We want that diabolical couple [Ortega and Murillo] to leave the country and democracy to return,” said Marcos Martinez, one of about a thousand demonstrators in the Costa Rican capital, San Jose.
In Nicaragua itself, gatherings of more than 200 people are banned, ostensibly as a COVID-19 prevention measure.
The opposition in exile has called for a boycott of Sunday’s vote.
The election took place without international observers and with most foreign media denied access to the country.
Only “election attendants” and journalists from countries the government considers “friendly,” such as Russia, received accreditation.
Election authorities banned the country’s main opposition alliance from contesting Sunday’s vote.
Two-thirds of respondents in a recent Cid-Gallup poll said they would have voted for an opposition candidate.
The favorite was Cristiana Chamorro, daughter of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who is the only person to have beaten Ortega in an election, in 1990.
Chamorro is under house arrest, and six other presidential hopefuls are jailed in conditions their families say amount to torture.
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