A protester chants anti-government slogans against Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega back in 2015 in Managua, Nicaragua. AP Photo/Esteban Felix.
In 1989, ten years into the Sandinista revolution, a ramshackle coalition of fourteen different parties jumped at the chance of a second open election. It cobbled together to oppose the then-revolutionary President Daniel Ortega, weakened by a decade of war dreamt up in Washington’s corridors. The coalition was weak, divided and faced the full force of an FSLN-government electoral machine as well as multiple other “opposition” groups on the ballot paper. But it rallied around the symbolic figure of Violeta Chamorro, widow of the La Prensa editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, whose assassination in 1978 had sparked the revolution and the end of the Somoza dictatorship. It forced a war-weary population to pick a side, and even die-hard Sandinistas voted, in droves, for an end to the eighties. In 2011 too, with a practically demolished PLC, finally crumbling under the reputation of El Gordo, the election became a two horse race. Those who turned away from Ortega had a clear, respected alternative in the radio institution that is Don Fabio Gadea. On both these occasions, polarity came before unity. The priority was to clarify the choice, to force a decision, to turn an election into a referendum.
This year’s front running opposition coalition, led by the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), believes that only unmitigated fraud denied it victory in 2011. They are betting that 2016 will be no rerun, and that the very same strategy of polarization has a chance. Two recent developments, however, put the success of this plan into serious doubt.
