Varieties of imperial decline : the
Nicaraguan election
Nicaragua has just given the world another political lesson on a par
with the election of 1990 in which power was transferred from a
left-wing revolutionary government to its visceral right-wing enemies
via peaceful elections. Now the country's right wing parties have
conceded power to the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional opening
up governmental space for progressive political options in Central
America for the first time since that historic 1990 vote ended the
revolutionary government of the 1980s. The professionalism and
impartiality of Nicaragua's election authorities, highly praised and
fulsomely congratulated by all the many international election
observers, has been in extremely stark contrast to the recent blatant
electoral fraud in Mexico and the dodgy electoral processes this year
in Peru and Ecuador. In comparison with Nicaragua's election, the
electoral process in much of the giant banana republic that is the
United States repesents a shameful betrayal of the United States
people's democratic rights.
Nicaragua has now had three presidential elections since the Sandinista
FSLN government lost power in 1990. That 1990 election and all
subsequent elections have been marked by crude intervention from the
United States government as well as more subtle meddling from European
Union countries. In none of these elections have Nicaraguans been able
to go and vote without being told by people they ignore at their peril
that a vote for the FSLN would be bad for Nicaragua. The persistent
demonization of the FSLN and its Secretary General Daniel Ortega
renders typically hypocritical and dishonest claims that the US and its
allies support free and fair elections.
The significance of the electoral triumph of the FSLN-led Unida
Nicaragua Triunfa alliance can hardly be overstated. It is a decisive
and damning setback for US diplomacy in the region from which it is
hard to see the current Bush administration recovering. It marks a
decision to work out redistributive alternatives promoting equality
against the catastrophic economic policies imposed by international
financial institutions and the imperial centres of power in Washington,
Brussels and Tokyo for the last twenty years. The election result also
opens up both Nicaragua and the wider Central American region to the
influence of Latin American integration processes as represented
variously by Ingacio Lula da Silva and Nestor Kirchner in Brazil and
Argentina and by Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in Bolivia,
Venezuela and Cuba.
Daniel Ortega will take office on January 10th 2007. For the moment, he
and his colleagues are working overtime to reassure the diverse hostile
sectors of Nicaraguan society that there is no destructive threat to
the country's current economic policy and that no radical changes will
be made without seeking consensus. The immediate priority the FSLN is
discussing how to address is hunger. In a country with 80% of people
living on US$2 a day or less, that on its own represents a daunting
challenge. To get some idea of the wider challenges and choices facing
the new government in Nicaragua and what can be expected in the short
and medium term it may help to review some aspects of Nicaragua's
contemporary history.
The election itself
The elections consisted of separate ballots for President, deputies in
the National Assembly and deputies to the regional Central American
parliament. A useful rule of thumb when following the count in
Nicaraguan elections is to look immediately at what is happening in the
capital Managua and in the country's most populous rural department,
Matagalpa. Whoever wins those places generally wins overall. That rule
proved itself again this time around with the FSLN winning Managua by
about 4 percentage points and just squeezing ahead of the PLC in
Matagalpa. The FSLN's majority vote is now very clearly rooted in the
northern departments from the Northern Autonomous Atlantic Region
in the east to Chinandega and Leon in the west. Its support in the
capital stayed solid despite a strong challenge from the centrist
social democrat MRS alliance. The northern departments of the country
and the Atlantic Coast departments are generally more impoverished than
the south.
Before the election I reckoned that the FSLN would win with 36-38% of
the vote, with the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) second on
about 24%, the National Liberal Alliance (ALN) on 21%, the Movement for
Sandinista Renewal (MRS) on 14% and the tiny Christian Alternative (AC)
on about 3%. In fact, with about 92% of the votes counted, the FSLN
have won with 38%, nine points ahead of the ALN on 29% with the PLC on
about 26%, the MRS on about 6% and the AC with less than 1%. It looks
as though the PLC may well draw level with the ALN as the last 8% of
the votes come in from rural areas where the PLC has a massive
following with around seven out of every ten voters likely to count in
their favour. The MRS were counting on getting a large number of the
18% of voters whom opinion polls prior to the vote indicated were
undecided. In the event those votes seem to have gone to the ALN.
The FSLN lost to the PLC in the traditional central Liberal bastions of
Jinotega (PLC candidate Jose Riso's home department), Boaco, Chontales,
and in the impoverished southern Atlantic Coast departments of Rio San
Juan, and the Southern Autonomous Atlantic Region. The FSLN lost to the
ALN (which incorporated the Conservative party thus benefiting from
that grouping's regional loyalties), in the relatively prosperous
southern departments of Granada, Rivas and Masaya. The FSLN won Nueva
Segovia, Madriz, Esteli, Chinandega (ALN leader Eduardo Montealegre's
home department), Leon, Managua, Matagalpa, Carazo and the Northern
Autonomous Atlantic Region. So the FSLN won outright 9 out of the
country's 17 departments in the presidential elections.
With the complete definitive results not scheduled to be made public
until November 17th, the distribution of votes for the legislature
between the three main parties looks like leaving the FSLN as the
largest single party with 37 or 38 seats. The PLC may well turn out to
have a slight numerical advantage over the ALN, but they both will end
up with around 24 or 26 seats each. The MRS is likely to get 5 or 6
deputies which may allow them to strike useful deals with one or other
of the larger parties. No political grouping on its own will be able to
dominate the legislative agenda over the next five years, with all the
drawbacks and advantages such a situation creates. The FSLN will be in
permanent negotiating mode, something it has become well used to over
the last 16 years in opposition.
The FSLN through the 1990s
Since its electoral defeat in 1990, the FSLN has represented
progressive and nationalist political forces against Liberal and
Conservative parties that represent different components of the local
oligarchy and local big business. Through the 1990s, the FSLN elite
assimilated and accommodated to the relentless reality of neo-liberal
economic policies imposed forcefully by the international financial
institutions and the powerful, ruthlessly enforced consensus between
the United States, the European Union and their Pacific allies like
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. As elsewhere, the cruelty and savagery
of these policies destroyed the prospects of well-being for the poor
majority in Nicaragua, relentlessly driving down living standards
throughout the decade and into the new century.
The political configuration in Nicaragua could hardly remain unaltered
by that process. In relation specifically to the FSLN, the sandinista
elite adapted successfully economically in two main directions. Leading
sandinistas developed business interests in every sector of the
economy, from agriculture to tourism, to banking. Another bloc joined
the managerial class dependent on development funding from the major
foreign aid agencies, the various UN agencies and development project
funding from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. As
this process panned out, ideological differences became more and more
apparent, resulting largely from the degree to which different
individuals were prepared to assimilate the dominant neo-liberal
ideology, at its most seductive in its social democrat form.
The main battlegrounds for these differences within the FSLN through
the 1990s were responses to the FSLN leadership's negotiations with the
politically dominant Liberal Alliance under Arnoldo Aleman, the power
struggle over how to manage internal party matters within the FSLN and,
within that context, the conflict between Daniel Ortega and his adult
step-daughter Zoilamerica Narvaez, involving allegations of sexual
abuse against Ortega. Dissidents from the FSLN developed their
political expression through the Movement for Sandinista Renewal
founded early in the 1990s and led initially by Sergio Ramirez, one of
Latin America's most acclaimed writers. In many ways this year's
election campaign has brought a clear resolution to the overall
conflict within the FSLN, leaving political loyalties and positions
clearer than perhaps they have ever been.
Although members of the MRS had been prepared in earlier elections to
make alliances with the FSLN - for example in the municipal elections
of 2004 - for the 2006 elections they opted to make an electoral
alliance led by Herty Lewites, who had previously been elected as the
FSLN candidate for mayor of the capital Managua in 2000. That alliance,
openly endorsed by the US State Department and more quietly by European
Union countries, fought the election campaign on a centrist social
democrat platform. The positions in that campaign inside Nicaragua were
much less radical than those argued by MRS representatives making their
case in foreign information media. If the MRS leadership seem to have
been taken by surprise by their lack of electoral support, which
vindicated the strategic vision and tactical acumen of the FSLN
leadership, it may well be because they had come to believe their own
rhetoric. Only 6% or so of Nicaraguans did so too.
Hate, exhaustion, reality
Bewilderment among progressive people outside Nicaragua at the FSLN's
electoral triumph is probably due in large part to the disinformation
and demonization of the FSLN by foreign media, overtly sympathetic to
the attractive and articulate personalities among the leadership of the
MRS. If progressive Spanish language online media like Venezuela's
Aporrea or Argentina's La Fogata favoured MRS propaganda then it is
hardly surprising that corporate US and European media tended to do so
too when they did not openly favour right wing banker Eduardo
Montealegre. But inside Nicaragua all that demonization of Daniel
Ortega and the FSLN leadership flopped, because people in Nicaragua are
familiar with the contradictions of both sides of the FSLN and have
been so since the years of the revolution. It takes a special kind of
hate-filled, grossly conceited solipsism to focus solely or principally
on the alleged failings of Daniel Ortega. Nearly 40% of a very high
turn out did not and voted for Ortega because, as the FSLN candidate,
he was the only one offering them a way out of the miserable dead-end
subsistence economy endured for so long out of neo-colonial dependency
on the United States and its allies.
All the main political parties engaged in a consistent hate campaign
against Ortega and the FSLN with the active encouragement of the US
State Department and its ambassador Paul Trivelli who, while obviously
not himself a candidate, certainly behaved through 2006 as though he
were on the campaign trail. It is impossible to communicate to people
outside Nicaragua the pernicious effects of all that negative
campaigning. Likewise it is hard for people unfamiliar with Central
America to sense the power and attraction to voters of the aggressive
creativity and dynamism shown by right-wing political parties like the
PLC in Nicaragua or ARENA in El Salvador. When Nicaragua's corrupt
former President Arnoldo Aleman over-reached himself out of sheer greed
and then insisted on remaining in control of the PLC, he gifted the
FSLN in two senses. He irredeemably tarnished his party with corruption
and terminally divided the Liberal Alliance he himself had so
brilliantly carved out in the mid 1990s. FSLN strategists were able to
take advantage of that fatal political moment for the Central American
Right and they did so with determination and flair.
A combination of exhaustions also favoured the FSLN. The exhaustion and
failure of the Liberal Alliance resulted largely from the impatience
and arrogance of the ALN's government-sponsored candidate Eduardo
Montealegre, who ended up depending on undecided voters to squeeze into
a tenuous second place
ahead of the PLC's lack-lustre Jose Rizo. Both candidates suffered from
propaganda exhaustion - they plied the same old anti-FSLN, anti-Ortega
hate material and the same old unconvincing "more and better
everything" promises of all their previous campaigns. Contradicted by
daily reality for 80% of the population, the Liberal parties were
unable to break down the FSLN vote. Similarly, the exhaustion of MRS
credibility meant they were unable to divide the sandinista vote. While
it is certainly true that their campaign suffered a very cruel setback
with the decease of their original candidate Herty Lewites in July, it
seems likely that even the very talented Lewites would have managed
mainly to attract undecided voters away from Montealegre rather than
split the FSLN's solid support.
Outlook - brighter later
Not much is likely to change fast in Nicaragua. Right now the FSLN is
preparing for government and working hard for a stable transition.
Nicaragua has suffered over 20 years of political conflict. People will
deeply resent any return to sharp and loudly aggressive polarisation -
especially from an FSLN that based its electoral victory on a message
of reconciliation and unity. It will take the new government time to
devise ways of redistributing wealth and promoting equality without
generating destabilising conflict. But the desperate, long-neglected
needs of the impoverished majority are likely to press hard for
resolution right from the start. Other issues will also figure
urgently. The abuse of its power by the Catholic church hierarchy to
force a vote against therapeutic abortion in October at the height of
the election campaign has already begun to cost the lives of vulnerable
women. It is hard to see that divisive controversial issue staying
unaddressed for very long.
Likewise the matter of urban bus fares in the capital Managua and the
chronic failures of the country's electricity generating and
distribution system will be important tests of the FSLN's ability to
meet people's expectations. Controversial environmental issues like the
Copalar hydroelectric mega-project in the Paiwas area of the Atlantic
Coast are also potential trials of the FSLN's commitment to meeting
people's real needs rather than simply rolling over and playing along
with the Plan Puebla Panama corporate game of the Inter-American
Development Bank. In the area of international relations, one key and
very delicate question for Nicaragua is whether it will now recognise
the People's Republic of China and how it will manage its relations
with Taiwan, which has significant investments in the country. None of
those kinds of issues are simple and one or all of them, badly managed,
could demoralise different sectors of support for the FSLN in
Nicaragua.
It is certain that the FSLN will very quickly find itself having to
work hard to balance powerful social and economic elite interests like
big business and the Catholic church against various popular,
progressive and radical demands on social issues like therapeutic
abortion, and fundamental needs like housing, land and the minimum
salary. To some extent the FSLN will be able to argue that even in
government it has to work with the legislature in order to establish
sustainable and viable measures. But that line will only work for a
while, if at all, in controlling the huge expectations people have of
the new government. An invaluable advantage the FSLN will enjoy is the
support and solidarity of President Chavez and his government in
Venezuela and of other powerful Mercosur countries like Brazil and
Argentina.
The prospects generally In Nicaragua are for immediate palliative
measures while more sustainable redistributive policies are worked out
to meet campaign commitments on education, healthcare, energy and
transport. While they and their colleagues deal with the daily nitty
gritty of delivering on those promises, the subtle strategists who
steered the FSLN to this hard-won election victory have probably
already started provisional planning towards the elections in 2011. The
FSLN cannot do other than seek to realise the anti-imperialist Latin
American vision of Augusto Cesar Sandino and it will need ten to
fifteen years in power to do so. They have opened a bridgehead in
Central America. One way or another, the motif of Latin American
integration will be decisive in both the domestic and foreign policy of
the new FSLN government in Nicaragua.
It is very hard to see the Mercosur countries and the ALBA
framework of Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela failing to exploit this new
especially friendly opening into Central American markets. Nor are
local Nicaraguan and Central American business interests going to turn
down opportunities in South America. If Nicaragua signs up to ALBA, it
is hard to believe that, for example, Honduras will not be tempted to
follow suit. Whatever integration model one looks at, the chances of
the US State Department continuing to maintain its historical chokehold
on the options available to the peoples of Central America are slim
indeed. People often voice perplexity that the US should care so much
about keeping tiny Nicaragua on a viciously tight rein. The clear
strategic importance of this electoral defeat for the US government,
another downward ratchet in US imperial decline, puts most of the
pieces of that puzzle in place.