On Jan. 26, Nicaragua’s legislature concluded a constitutional reform process that altered over 100 elements of Nicaragua’s 1987 constitution. These changes notably created a co-presidency, a position designed for President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. This guarantees that if Ortega, now 79 and in poor health, becomes unable to govern, Murillo will retain control of the country.
Ortega has been active in Nicaraguan politics his whole life. As a teenager, he joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a left-wing revolutionary group fighting to bring down the Somoza dictatorship that ruled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1979. After the overthrow of the Somoza regime he became president, but was voted out of office in democratic elections in 1990. Since returning to the presidency in 2007, Ortega has taken steps to assure that he and his family will not lose another election.
The recent constitutional revisions serve to deepen and entrench Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime. These changes centralize power, further dampen freedom of expression, and alter the coercive apparatus in ways that will facilitate unchecked repression. While this recent move fundamentally alters the constitution, it follows a long path of democratic erosion that began even before Ortega reassumed power in 2007.
The emergence of Nicaraguan democracy
In 1979, the FSLN overthrew the long-standing Somoza dictatorship. However, the win occurred in the broader context of the Cold War. After the FSLN’s victory, the United States sponsored a counterrevolutionary war and later implemented a trade and finance embargo against the Sandinista regime.
Against this backdrop, in an attempt to shore up domestic as well as European political support, the FSLN implemented a series of democratic reforms that set up a presidential system with a unicameral legislature. In 1984, the FSLN held and won elections that were not fully competitive but nonetheless resulted in roughly one-third of the legislative seats going to opposition parties.
The next presidential election took place in 1990, when ordinary Nicaraguans were feeling the effects of U.S. pressure. GDP per capita and real wages had fallen dramatically, inflation was severe, and government austerity measures had eroded the social programs the FSLN had initiated during the party’s first years in power. With the economy a crucial electoral issue, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, running as part of a broad opposition coalition, won the election. The Carter Center, one of the international electoral observers monitoring the process, reported that this election represented “the first time in Nicaraguan history [that] all of the political parties that began the electoral campaign completed it, and all agreed to accept and respect the vote both before the election and afterwards.”
Under Chamorro, Nicaragua further institutionalized its nascent democracy. She helped end the partisan nature of the Supreme Court and Supreme Electoral Council, and depoliticized the military. The legislature then amended the constitution, transferring control of the national budget from the presidency to the legislature, improving the balance of powers, and also banning the immediate reelection of the president and their close relatives.
Democracy’s erosion
In 1996, Arnoldo Alemán of the conservative Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) was elected president. In 2000, with the country in economic distress from Hurricane Mitch and Alemán facing multiple accusations of corruption, Alemán secretly negotiated a political pact with Daniel Ortega. The two leaders then used their parties’ control of the legislature to amend the constitution and electoral law to put the pact into effect. One plank of this pact was that the departing presidential candidate and the second-place finisher in presidential elections would automatically get a seat in the National Assembly. This would grant them parliamentary immunity from criminal prosecution, protecting Alemán from corruption charges. Parliamentary immunity also benefited Ortega, who was facing a sexual abuse accusation that became a highly public issue in 1998.
While the FSLN was the largest opposition party in the legislature at the time, many doubted Ortega could win a majority in a presidential election, given his polarizing history. Importantly, however, the pact lowered the electoral threshold to win the presidency to 35% of the total vote, plus at least a 5% lead over the nearest political rival, a number Ortega could and later did reach.
More damaging to the country’s fledgling democratic institutions, the pact re-politicized Nicaragua’s state institutions. Thus, no matter who won the 2001 general elections, the FSLN and PLC would each appoint half of the Supreme Electoral Council and the Supreme Court. In addition, the pact included changes to the country’s electoral rules. New electoral legislation made it virtually impossible to form new political parties and raised hurdles for small parties to maintain their official registration. Consequently, after the 2001 elections small parties held almost no seats in the legislature, compared to 15 seats in the previous legislative term.
Ortega’s return to power
All this paved the way for Ortega to win the 2006 elections with only 38% of the vote. Political scientist Kai Thaler notes that, since returning to office, Ortega has overseen Nicaragua’s “slide from competitive authoritarianism toward authoritarianism plain and simple.”
While Ortega immediately began chipping away at laws that would prevent him from exercising unchecked power, many authoritarian changes were institutionalized in Ortega’s broad efforts to revamp the constitution in 2014. These 2014 constitutional changes legalized unlimited reelection. It gave presidential decrees the status of law, making the legislature a rubber stamp. And it placed the police and military more firmly under Ortega’s control.
In 2018 the public took to the streets in protest, triggered by proposed pension cuts. The police responded aggressively, firing live ammunition against unarmed civilians. In the months that followed, the protests spread across the country and were met with increasing repression. The U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights documented numerous human rights violations, including widespread arbitrary detentions, excessive use of force, and extrajudicial killings. In the aftermath of the protests, the regime further tightened the screws by shutting down nongovernmental organizations and independent media.
Since the protests, Ortega has continued to rely on repression to maintain power. In the run-up to the 2021 elections, his regime arrested presidential hopefuls from half a dozen opposition parties. Since the election, critics of the regime, including clergy, have been arrested and sentenced to long prison terms in sham trials. Others have been exiled and stripped of their citizenship.
What’s in the recently approved constitutional changes?
In addition to the creation of a co-presidency, the recent constitutional revisions centralize power in the executive, and deepen and formalize practices the Ortega regime was already employing.
The constitution now defines the presidency as coordinator of the legislature, judiciary, and electoral branch, ending the separation of powers. These changes also granted the executive more discretionary power to fire public officials. According to Jan-Michael Simon, chair of the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, “the current Government is apparently aiming to legalize and consolidate its hold on unrestricted power.”
Nicaragua’s constitution currently leaves less space for civil society organizations to speak and act. The constitution now includes a provision allowing the government to strip “traitors to the homeland” of their citizenship, legalizing the practice begun after the 2021 elections. In addition, the constitutional changes stipulate that media organizations and religious institutions must be free of foreign influence. In addition, religious events that disrupt public order will no longer be permitted, officially allowing the regime to ban religious processions.
The reform also gave legal stature to the “volunteer police,” defined as a voluntary civilian force intended to support the formal police. Thousands have been inducted, swearing loyalty to Ortega and Murillo in ceremonies in which inductees’ faces were covered with balaclavas. According to human rights groups, this move formalized the paramilitaries that have been responsible for acts of repression since the 2018 protests.
The consequences of Ortega’s personalization of power
With these recent moves, Ortega has successfully cemented a shift from a party-based to a personalist dictatorship. In personalist regimes, power is highly concentrated in the leader and there are no autonomous political institutions. These regimes tend to exhibit higher levels of policy volatility because, as political scientists Alex Baturo, Luca Anceschi, and Francesco Cavatorta note, the lack of constraints allows leaders to “translate their idiosyncratic, and at times idiotic, preferences into policy.”
But alongside high levels of discretionary power and opportunities for corruption, the move to a personalist regime carries major risks. Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz’s study of autocratic breakdown found that 69% of personalist leaders faced exile, imprisonment, or death after an ouster, compared to only 37% of dominant-party leaders. It also found that countries run by personalist leaders were least likely to democratize. Given the severe limits on autonomous groups, mass protest is one of the few tools available to overthrow this type of regime. That said, the personalization of power also leads to higher levels of repression and decreased respect for human rights, which makes popular organizing challenging.
Indeed, Ortega’s increasing personalization of power has been associated with higher levels of repression. According to Human Rights Watch’s “Nicaragua: Events of 2024” report, since 2018, the government has closed 5,600 nongovernmental organizations – 80% of those working in the country – and shuttered at least 58 media outlets. In addition, since 2023, the government has stripped over 450 people of their Nicaraguan citizenship. Many are now stateless, putting Nicaragua in violation of international law guaranteeing the fundamental human right to a nationality. And by July 2024, 345,800 Nicaraguans were seeking asylum abroad and another 30,000 had been recognized as refugees.
In addition, by designating his wife as co-president, Ortega has put in place a strategy that attempts to solve the potential regime destabilization that can occur in personalist regimes upon the leader’s death. Analysts assume that this move is intended to smoothly transition the couple’s son into governing as co-president with Murillo, once Ortega becomes unable to govern. Thus, prospects for democratic change in Nicaragua look bleak.
Shelley A. McConnell is the Charles D., Sarah A. and John D. Munsil Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Lawrence University. She has monitored elections in Nicaragua since 1989 with the United Nations and with The Carter Center, and regularly publishes scholarly works on Nicaragua’s elections and politics.
Heather Sullivan is a 2024-2025 Good Authority fellow.
