How are the recent Nicaragua eleсtions to be seen to the background of Central American politics? Does the rise to power of the new president Arnoldo Alemán simply reflect the internal situation in Nicaragua or is there a more widespread ongoing tendency in Central America?
At the time of writing, just after the elections of 20 October, we still do not know the definitive results. There is no doubt, however, about the winner. The president-elect is Arnoldo Alemán, the Alianza Liberal (AL) candidate who passed the forty-five per cent hurdle and so
could be declared outright winner after the first round. According to the latest figures, Alemán won more than fortyeight per cent of the votes, whereas the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) candidate, former president Daniel Ortega, got around thirty-eight
per cent.
The FSLN has not accepted the verdict of the ballot boxes, claiming that there were irregularities in the vote, especially in peripheral areas. Although the organisation was certainly shoddy and confused, especially in rural areas, the international observers unanimously agree that the anomalies were not serious enough to invalidate the result.
As had been widely expected, the other candidates, including former vice-president Sergio Ramirez, who had abandoned the FSLN to becomea candidate for the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, (MRS), claiming to be the true heir of the Sandinista movement, were way behind
the two main contenders, crushed under the weight of the extreme bipolarism that characterises Nicaraguan political life. This result penalises many leading political figures and many parties in the Unión Nacional Opositora, the coalition that took Violeta Barrios de Chamorro to victory in 1990. Suffice to say that the third-placed candidate was the evangelical pastor Guillermo Osorno of Caminо Cristiano Nicaraguense (CNC) and he is far from representing any traditional political forces.
Alemán’s victory was forecast some time back: for the past year the former mayor of Managua had been the man to beat and he had always seemed to be able to attract most centre-right voters contrary to any return to Sandinista rule.
His most dangerous rival, the former minister to the presidency and son-inlaw of Violeta Chamorro, Antonio Lacayo was not allowed to take part in the election. A key figure in the previous presidency and a genuine ‘shadow’ president, he was barred from the contest because of a constitutional reform preventing relatives of the outgoing president from
standing for election (we will return to this important measure below).
Mrs Chamorro’s main claim to fame as UNO candidate in the 1990 elections was as the widow of the charismatic anti-Somoza leader, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. She was no more than a flagwaving choice to keep together a heterogeneous coalition of fourteenn parties (all
the political movements except the Sandinistas). This was the only chance the opposition had of defeating the FSLN, which had been in power since the fall of Somoza in 1979.
Predictably, once the electoral objective of defeating Ortega in February 1990 had been reached, the coalition soon ran into problems. The bancada UNO (‘bench as the Nicaragua parliamentary groups are known) had a bust up and Violeta Chamorro, who was no politician, broke with a large part of the coalition supporting her. She promptly delegated power to her son-in-law and took on a role that was basically that of first lady or ambassador for the new Nicaragua on the world scene.
Chamorro no longer had balanced relations with the various political forces in the UNO. Moreover, the majority was not large enough to allow the coalition to pursue reforms able to modify substantially the Sandinista legacy. So the Lacayo-Chamorro gang of two set about
governing on the basis of a de facto alliance with the opposition led by Sergio Ramirez.
But what was the significance of that alliance, especially in view of the very bitter head-on uncompromising election campaigns in 1990?
Although we have already stressed the structural weakness of Chamorro’s majority, all the impartial observers had to admit that the legacy of eleven years of Sandinista rule was not totally negative. Led by Daniel Ortega and his brother Humberto at the head of the armed forces, and inspired by radical left-wing ideas, the Sandinistas had make some serious mistakes in running the economy because they pursued an economic model based on the collective ownership of the means of production, which has always been doomed to practical
failure. But their biggest mistake was probably making social and educational policies a priority in an age when the climate of the world economy was diametrically opposed to such priorities. And even leading aside the quality of leadership or the good will of the ruling class, we may well wonder if it was really feasible to pursue experiments in social transformation in a Central American country in the 1980s.
Sandinistism is a Latin American and not Soviet form of left-wing ideology. But its great historic chance could not have соme at a worse time in terms of negative external conditions. Having inadvertently become a theatre for a political and military battle with much wider-ranging consequences than the effective scope of the Sandinista revolution, Nicaragua took on a disproportionate role in international chessboard as the protagonist of an ideological confrontation whose significance went way beyond the actual situation in the country.
The hostility of the Reagan and Bush administrations towards the Managua government, especially in their theatrical backing for the Contras created conditions that made the Sandinista experiment totally unfeasible. If, to this problem, we add the objective difficulties created by the civil war and the extreme position adopted by the Sandinista leaders who rejected all compromises and retreated to totally untenable strategic and ideological positions, we begin to see why the Sandinistas could hardly have been successful. Nonetheless, despite their failure, they did make a number of laudable social reforms.
Although the FSLN pursued a utopian and excessively radical policy for a decade, it was not out of place in a country with alarming levels of poverty and injustice (crossing Managua even catches those used to Third-World poverty unawares). Thus the new ground won could not be eliminated overnight and even the supporters of the victorious opposition in 1990 as well as the Catholic Church, which had always had stormy relations with the Sandinistas, had to acknowledge this. The combination of these factors led to the cooperation between the UNO government (or rather Violeta Chamorro’s government) and the andinista opposition. This only came into being in the second half of the president’s term of office after a long period of quibbling inside the majority and between the majority and the opposition.
The main consequence of this change in attitude from 1994 on was the constitutional reform approved in 1995. The reform changed the composition of the Supreme Court and the Electoral Board in an attempt to de-politicise them. Mоreover, the presidential term of office was reduced from six to five years and the access for relatives of the president in office to elected positions restricted. This measure, introduced through an amendment and not part of the original bill, may seem fairly insignificant. But it must be remembered that in Nicaragua a small group of families has most of the economic and political power. An external observer is immediately struck by the fact that fifteen or so surnames recur very often on both sides of the parliament and in key posts in the administration and the private sector. Although it contains no major changes, the reform is definitely a significant step forward on the road to
modernising the Nicaragua political system.
The collaboration between government and opposition which led to the reform was not free form deep ideological contrasts, still very much a part of Nicaraguan political life. This is perhaps inevitable in a country after a long war (50,000 people have died out of a population of 4.5 million since 1978), which has to tackle a situation of dire poverty. The per capita income in Nicaragua is 430 US dollars, the lowest in the American continent and superior only to Haiti. The polarisation of the political system is thus a consequence of the devastating
contrasts asts which caused a long civil war and the dramatic social situation further
embittering ideological conflicts.
But how should we interpret the second electoral defeat of the FSLN, which is still the largest single political party?
The Sandinista failure as a radical party was followed by its failure in a socialdemocratic version. Ortega’s new look caused a great deal of surprise. His electoral strategy was based on reconciliatory tones that had none of the belligerence of the past.
The FSLN candidate for vice-president was an former land owner, Juan Manuel Caldera. This highlights the new spirit of reconciliation in the meeker Sandinistas. President Ortega gave up his battle-dress grey and green for immaculate white shirts in his presidential campaign. This
strategy yielded good results because the party made up a lot of ground over the last year and doubled its vote compared to the polls a year earlier. But yet again the Central American left showed it was unable to win elections: the surprise defeat of 1990 was followed by the predicted defeat of 1996.
What did more damage than the unconvincing conversion of the Sandinistas was the phenomenon known as piñatismo – i.e. the indiscriminate grabbing of expropriated assets by some leading Sandinistas in the period from the electoral defeat of 1990 till Violeta Chamorro formally took office. In addition to past errors, common to many ‘real socialist’ countries, this attitude discredited the Sandinista conversion to democracy and tarnished the positive results of their rule.
The difficult conversion of the revolutionary left to the responsibilities of government is not only a Nicaraguan problem but reflects the more general difficulties encountered by the left in Latin America, which is experiencing a deep existential crisis only partly connected to the waning of real socialism and the crisis affecting the left in Western countries.
The basic weakness is due to the lack of a welfare state, whose defence and modernisation have become the main battlefront for the European left. In Central America the revolutionary utopia has gone and the left has not been able to transform its radical claims into credible proposals for reform in the reconstruction process affecting civil societies in the region. The extreme economic hardship experienced by most countries in the region renders impractical any social pоlicy compatible with the international conditions imposed on the countries. In
practice the political proposals of the centre-right, often tinged with populism, are more successful.
The end of ideologies has meant the success for policies that have been effective in terms of good management and this explains the frequent victories of former mayors in recent elections (in addition to Alemán, they include Calderón, former mayor of San Salvador and Arzú, the former first citizen of Ciudad de Guatemala).
The past decade saw the gradually spread of peace in Central America and a beginning to the reconstruction of societies and economic systems. The next step, already partially underway in some countries, is the modernisation of state structures and the reduction in social inequalities through economic development.
In this sense Nicaragua, but also El Salvador. Guatemala and Honduras have everything to gain from a gradually widening of the base of real power and the smoothing out of the ideological
contrasts of the past. Thus Arnoldo Alemán’s success must not be viewed pessimistically as a return to the past (Somozism) but as a further step towards economic and social stabilisation in a context of the gradual consolidation of democracy.