Daniel Ortega: No Elections For You!

I am reading Fabrice Lehoucq's book The Coup Trap in Latin America for a journal and it immediately came to mind when I saw that Daniel Ortega announced the end of elections in Nicaragua. Among other things (you'll have to wait for the review for more), Lehoucq argues that one way out of the coup trap is for a dictatorship to sever any ties between the military and potential civilian coup plotters. That is relatively rare and requires a lot of violence--you have to crush the disloyal. You have to be in power for about 20 years before the chances of a coup go from positive to negative. Ortega has been in office for 19.

That said, Nicaragua is a weird case because Ortega has not been a dictator for that whole time. Like with other cases of electoral authoritarianism, his crackdowns emerged gradually, becoming increasingly violent. But it does seem a case of successful killing, imprisoning, and exiling your way to political stability. Ortega is looking ahead to the 2027 elections, a time when according to Lehoucq we would expect an increased chance of a coup, and like so many other dictators is getting his affairs in order to avoid any real political challenge.

It's also a weird case because it's a co-presidency where octogenarian Ortega barely ever shows his face. This doesn't necessarily change the coup calculus because he has a co-president wife and an entire repressive apparatus to keep things humming along. It just makes the whole situation more sad and pathetic, the worst possible conclusion to a political career that began by trying to overthrow a dictator. He actually said he had to abolish elections to make sure Somocistas could never return to power.