Juanlu González
Member of the Network of Intellectuals in Defence of Humanity
Everything is practically ready for the general elections to be held in the Republic of Nicaragua on 7 November, scrupulously complying with the dates set out in the electoral calendar. Six political parties are competing to elect a mixed presidential and vice-presidential candidate, 92 deputies for the National Assembly and another 20 for the Central American Parliament.
The parties in contention are the Constitutionalist Liberal Party, the main opposition party, which has produced two presidents in the country’s recent history (Arnoldo Alemán and Enrique Bolaños); the Sandinista National Liberation Front, currently in government with 72.44% of the votes cast; the Nicaraguan Christian Way; the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance, the main opposition party to the FSLN after the 2006 elections; the Alliance for the Republic (Alianza por la República) and the Independent Liberal Party (Partido Liberal Independiente).
If there is one thing that is striking about the electoral processes in this small Republic, it is the absolute respect for gender equality and its parity in the nominations. Nicaragua has the honour of being one of the five most egalitarian countries in the world, especially after the reform of the Political Constitution in 2014, promoted by the FSLN, which established by law that 50 percent of women and 50 percent of men should occupy the most relevant institutional positions. This is reflected in the 2020 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures parity between men and women in the areas of health, education, economics and politics worldwide.
Demoscopic studies project that around 3/4 of the population intends to go to the polls, which is a very high percentage of approval of the electoral system as a whole. What the international media repeat, however, is that the opposition does not participate in the elections and that a large part of the voters have no one to represent them. Of course, to consider as functional to Sandinismo the profoundly liberal parties that governed the country on several occasions (in alliance or alone), that implemented privatisation policies and demolished the welfare state and the rule of law achieved by Daniel Ortega and the FSLN, is simply false.
It is true that in Nicaragua there are a myriad of micro-parties that are created, change their names, enter into coalitions and alliances and disappear in each electoral contest but, in reality, no significant formation has fallen from the electoral line-up of the 2016 or 2011 elections. To be precise, only the Conservative Party of Nicaragua, founded by the husband of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the 45th president of the Republic from 1990 to 1997, is missing, but in the last democratic elections it obtained little more than 2% of the vote and a single, testimonial seat in parliament.
The November elections will therefore be held normally and with political plurality fully assured. If the United States, the European Union or the OAS want to disregard the result, it will not be because of a lack of democracy, but because they are anticipating a result that will not satisfy them.
But not only is freedom and political diversity guaranteed, there are also legal mechanisms that certify the transparency and reliability of the result. More than 80,000 people, proposed by all the political parties in the contest, will make up the 13,459 polling stations, known as Juntas Receptoras de Votos, distributed in the more than three thousand Polling Centres spread throughout Nicaragua. On the other hand, the political parties directly appoint a group of election monitors who will be present at all phases of the count, both in the Polling Stations and in the Municipal, Departmental and Regional Electoral Councils, in the Counting Centres and in the Supreme Electoral Council. It is practically impossible for the result of these General Elections not to correspond strictly to what was freely expressed by the will of the people.
To ensure a calm and normal process, the Ministry of the Interior and the Supreme Electoral Council have trained 30,000 volunteers to serve as electoral police who will be deployed at each Polling Station to guarantee the full right to vote freely. Finally, a large group of independent international analysts, under the protection of the Electoral Law in force, will act as Electoral Observers and will report on the cleanliness of the elections to the world public opinion.
© This article was originally published in Almayadeen / All rights reserved