NICARAGUA: Post-Election Chaos

By José Adán Silva Reprint | | Print |

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Nov 13 2008 (IPS) - Nicaragua’s electoral authorities will allow a recount of the votes in the capital cast in the Nov. 9 municipal elections to go ahead, in response to the right-wing opposition’s allegations of fraud.

The outcome of the elections, in which the governing leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) won a major victory, triggered violence and demands for a vote recount in the presence of election observers.

The right-wing Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) refused to recognise the results of the election, in which it won 49 mayoral races, compared to the FSLN’s 91, while small parties took the remaining six municipalities, according to the election council.

Led by former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2001) and the party’s candidate for mayor of Managua, Eduardo Montealegre, the PLC accused the FSLN of vote-rigging.

Alemán, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003 for money laundering and embezzlement during his term in office but was released from house arrest in 2007, formed an alliance in 1998 with current President Daniel Ortega to push through legislative amendments and divvy up key posts in the public administration between the two leading political forces.

Currently distanced from Ortega in his struggle to recover lost power, Alemán and the rest of the PLC leaders announced a work stoppage by the party’s representatives and delegates in the legislature, the public prosecutors’ office, the Supreme Court, the comptroller-general’s office, the courts and the electoral authorities, among other institutions.

Lawmaker Wilfredo Navarro, the PLC’s legal representative, presented a document to the election council denouncing a series of alleged irregularities in Sunday’s elections.

According to Navarro, by “permitting these reported irregularities,” the election council has showed a bias towards the governing party, and “the current situation has generated…a serious crisis of governability that could translate into a collapse or paralysis of the institutions and could generate social and economic breakdown.”

The PLC maintains that Montealegre won the election for mayor in Managua with 54 percent of the vote, and that former professional boxer Alexis Argüello of the FSLN took 46 percent.

With 70 percent of the ballots in Managua counted, the election council projects a victory by Argüello, with 51 percent of the vote, against the PLC candidate’s 46 percent.

In the meantime, both have declared victory.

Around 14 percent of the ballots have not yet been counted nationwide.

While the government and the FSLN have not made any official pronouncements, their supporters have been celebrating in the streets in dozens of towns and cities around the country.

Clashes have occurred since Monday between Sandinista supporters and PLC protesters in several cities. The situation has threatened to spiral into chaos, and has left at least two dead and dozens injured. Vehicles have been burnt, property vandalised, and streets blocked with burning tires. Many businesses have remained closed and a tense atmosphere reigns in the streets.

The latest serious incident occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when four unidentified assailants pulled journalist Nicolás Berríos, with the Sandinista Radio Ya station, out of his car, beat him and set the vehicle on fire.

Berríos blamed the attack on PLC leaders and held Alemán and Montealegre responsible for what happened to him and for the fate of other reporters who work for government media outlets.

After the attack, Sandinista supporters threatened, over Radio Ya, to set fire to installations of the La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario newspapers and the Canal 2 TV station, which are critical of the government.

The local election monitoring group Ética y Transparencia, which was not accredited by the electoral authorities to observe the elections, evacuated its staff after receiving threats that its central offices would be set on fire.

On Wednesday, Ética y Transparencia reported the results of its own parallel count, which found that the PLC candidate won in Managua with more than 50 percent of the vote.

Dozens of anti-riot police have been deployed around the offices of the groups and media outlets that have received threats.

The president of the election council, Roberto Rivas, said the PLC has no evidence of the supposed irregularities that it has denounced in Managua and other cities, and challenged the party to use legal channels to demonstrate that the elections were not clean.

But after meeting with ambassadors from a group of donor countries, Rivas publicly announced that the ballots would be recounted in the capital.

The country’s main newspapers printed photos Wednesday of ballots and other election materials allegedly discarded in garbage dumps, schools and rural lots in at least eight municipalities.

The demand for a vote recount monitored by election observers from international bodies like the Organisation of American States (OAS), former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Centre and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was supported by the Catholic Church’s bishops’ council, the Chamber of Industry, the Higher Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) and the American-Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM).

In Washington, OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza expressed his concern over the allegations of fraud, called for dialogue to resolve the controversy, and said the presence of OAS observers would have been “helpful.”

France, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, urged authorities in Nicaragua to make an effort to ensure transparency, and lamented the failure to accredit independent national and international election observers.

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez criticised the protests by the right in Nicaragua and accused the United States of engineering a boycott against the Ortega administration.

Ortega’s adviser on social questions, Orlando Núñez, said the outcome of the elections showed that voters were tired of the “neoliberal” governments that have run the country since 1990.

“The people voted for the government’s social programmes, for the candidates, and for a change in the system,” Núñez told the government TV station Canal 4.

“Sunday’s election shows that the FSLN gained a political majority in Nicaragua with 52 percent of the vote. And this isn’t about the number of city governments, but about a national political majority capable of carrying out the necessary changes in social policy.”

Analyst Aldo Díaz Lacayo said the FSLN’s apparent victory will force the right-wing opposition to regroup and accept the new reality.

“They are no longer in the majority, they are now a minority, and they cannot afford to demand legitimacy if the majority did not vote for them,” Díaz Lacayo told IPS.