President Daniel Ortega said Sunday that Nicaragua will not hold elections, effectively canceling the vote that had been scheduled for Nov. 2027.
Ortega made the declaration during a speech marking the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, railing on the United States and saying, "Parties put in place by the Yankees, put in place by the Somoza regime, coming back to power — that story is over."
The announcement follows a January 2025 vote by the government-controlled Congress to extend the five-year presidential term by one year, a change that had left the next election slated for Nov. 2027.
Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007 and, the article says, has rewritten the constitution, crushed political opposition and solidified his control over virtually all branches of the Nicaraguan government.
Mass protests in 2018 prompted a government crackdown that "killed hundreds," the article reports, and since then Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo have maintained their hold on power.
Opponents and rights groups described the Sunday announcement as an escalation. Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a 2021 candidate who was behind bars until he was released to the U.S. in 2023 with more than 200 other political prisoners, said the move "reveals Ortega's longstanding plan to consolidate power in the hands of the Sandinista party, similar to other one-party rule countries like China and Cuba."
Tiziano Breda, a senior Latin America analyst at independent conflict monitor ACLED, said, "Instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether." Danny Ramírez Ayérdiz, a Nicaraguan lawyer who founded the Interamerican Center for Legal Assistance in Human Rights, said the announcement "reveals the face of a dictatorship that, without any shame, has entrenched itself in power" and "indicates a potentially higher level of repression against people who demand the removal of the government or the holding of elections."
The Mechanism for Recognition of Political Prisoners group says at least 46 people are behind bars for political reasons; Nicaragua denies holding political prisoners. The government has in recent years released hundreds of imprisoned activists, religious leaders and politicians to the U.S. and Guatemala, the article says, often stripping many of their Nicaraguan citizenship and belongings, and those freed described being held in isolation and subjected to physical and psychological torture.
In recent years the government has shuttered more than 5,000 organizations, largely religious, and forced thousands to flee the country, the article reports. Earlier in July the Ortega-Murillo government stripped masses of lawyers of their licenses to practice in what U.N. experts called a "purge of the legal profession." The article also says that in the wake of a U.S. military operation that captured Venezuela's then-President Nicolás Maduro in a January raid, Nicaragua said it would release more prisoners, but "there has been no follow-up and little transparency" and at least one imprisoned activist has died since then.