By John Perry on November 10, 2022
photo: Radio La Primerisima
Sunday, November 6, saw the latest municipal elections in Nicaragua, with mayors and councilors elected for every city hall in the country, from the smallest to the largest (the capital, Managua). In the last general election, a year ago, 66% of voters took part. This time, not surprisingly, the percentage was smaller (57%), but still very respectable in international terms. Neighboring Costa Rica’s last local elections brought only a 25% turnout. Across the U.S., only 15 to 27% of eligible voters cast a ballot in their last local election. In the UK, turnout is usually about 30%, and only in Scotland have a few small districts seen turnout exceed 57%.
Here are some provisional results. On the day, 2.03 million valid votes were cast (some 80,000, or 3.79%, were judged to be invalid or spoiled). Of the total, 1.49 million (73%) went to the Sandinista coalition, and the remainder to opposition parties. The vote of Daniel Ortega’s party was sufficient to win the mayoral vote in every case, although the makeup of each local city council will depend on the proportionate split of the vote between parties. In the national tally, the next largest share of the votes was that of the PLC (Partido Liberal Constitucionalista): their 256,000 votes represented almost 13% of the total; four small parties took the remainder. There were four small towns, Ciudad Antigua, El Tortuguero, San José de los Remates and Santo Domingo, where the total opposition vote exceeded that for the Sandinistas, but in each case the vote was divided between different parties and the Sandinistas won the mayoral election.
That the governing party nationally won all 153 mayoral elections was no surprise since it had been making steady advances over the last two decades. As Stephen Sefton shows, in 2000 the party captured the Managua council for the first time, together with majorities in 51 other municipal councils. By 2004 the number increased to 87; by 2008 it was 109; in 2012 it reached 127 and, by the last election (2017), 135. Given that in the 2021 general election the Sandinista party won 75% of the vote on a higher turnout (66%), Sunday’s result was fully expected. It reflects the governing party’s success in stabilizing the country after the violent coup attempt in 2018, the enormous program of social investment it is carrying out (for example, building 24 new public hospitals in the last 15 years) and the country’s successful emergence from the Covid pandemic with less damage to its economy than is the case in neighboring countries.
Of course, this is not how the election was seen by Daniel Ortega’s international opponents. Brian A. Nichols, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said in advance that “Nicaraguans will once again be denied the right to freely & fairly choose their municipal leaders. As long as opposition leaders remain unjustly imprisoned or in exile, and their parties banned, there is no choice for the Nicaraguan people in yet another sham election.” Unsurprisingly, he ignored the crimes committed by so-called “opposition leaders”, for which they had been tried and convicted. None of those “leaders” had ever run in local elections, nor were they members of registered political parties.
As is usually the case, reports in the corporate media followed the same line. The Washington Post, using an Associated Press report from Mexico City, said that the vote followed “an electoral campaign without rallies, demonstrations or even real opposition.” This was a complete lie, since Sandinista rallies took place throughout the country in the weeks preceding the election, as did far smaller opposition ones. The party that gained the most opposition votes, the PLC, held power only two decades ago and has won seats in every recent municipal election. On the Caribbean coast, the YATAMA party also won large numbers of votes.
Once again, the obscure body called Urnas Abiertas (“Open Ballots”) was quoted in corporate media, despite no one knowing who the people in this group are or where their money comes from (their website gives no clue). Its main argument was that people only voted because they were forced to. This relied on various messages from public sector bodies urging their employees to vote – but, of course, it was a secret ballot so they were at liberty to vote for an opposition party or spoil their ballot paper. In any case, anyone visiting polling stations (as I did) could see that people were voting enthusiastically, not out of compulsion. Oddly, in a claim contradicting its main one, Urnas Abiertas also ludicrously asserts that 82% of people abstained from voting and that “the streets were empty”. In an article for COHA, I showed that similar claims were baseless in relation to last year’s election. In any case, social media offered plentiful evidence of large numbers of people going to voting stations.
Once again, Nicaragua’s democratic achievement proves to be the “threat of a good example” to Western countries where, in what are claimed to be superior democracies, a far smaller proportion of the electorate can be bothered to vote.
John Perry is based in Masaya, Nicaragua and writes for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, London Review of Books, FAIR and other outlets.
Source: AFGJ