NICARAGUA:
The Big Question - What Will Ortega Do?
José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, (IPS) - In the transition period between his electoral victory and his investiture as president of Nicaragua on Jan. 10, 2007, Daniel Ortega is making decisions about the direction his new government will take. He needs to secure a majority in parliament, but so far he has forged alliances only with business chambers.

His administration will be a blend of rhetoric to satisfy his leftwing international allies, populism for the masses and pragmatism in his dealings with international lenders and free trade treaties, his former vice-president Sergio Ramírez, a dissident Sandinista and writer, predicted acerbically.

Ortega's leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) holds only 38 of the 92 seats in the single-chamber parliament. But to pass laws, the government will need a majority (at least 47 votes).

Ramírez and Ortega were both members of the Junta of National Reconstruction (1979-1985) which governed Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution defeated the dynastic Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Afterwards, Ramírez served as Ortega's vice-president (1985-1990) in the elected Sandinista government.

Ortega won the elections on Nov. 5 with 38 percent of the vote. His previous stints in power (1979-1990) were marked by civil war between the "contra" militias, financed by Washington, and his government, supported by the then Soviet Union and the east European socialist bloc.

Ramírez, who left the FSLN in 1995, described to IPS what he believes the new Ortega administration will look like, and why he thinks the former president won the elections in this impoverished Central American country of 5.4 million people, despite efforts by the United States to prevent his victory.

"The main reason Ortega won the elections was the lowering of the threshold for a first-round win from 45 percent to 35 percent of the vote, and the division of the right which was split into two separate free-market oriented parties," he said.

The rightwing Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), led by former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2001), and the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN), led by PLC dissident Eduardo Montealegre, a banker, fielded separate candidates in the November elections.



Ortega was defeated at the ballot boxes in 1990 by the centre-right Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, in 1996 by Alemán and in 2001 by the incumbent president, Enrique Bolaños, a businessman.

In 2002 and 2004 an electoral reform agreed upon by the PLC and FSLN changed the percentage of votes required for a presidential candidate to win in the first ballot. The threshold was set at 40 percent, or 35 percent if the candidate had a five-point lead over the runner-up.

In the end, this was the key clause that handed the victory to Ortega.

"Ortega took advantage of the wear-and-tear and loss of credibility suffered by the last three governments which, although they brought fiscal and financial stability to the country, failed to make visible inroads into the poverty that afflicts so many people. There are more poor people in Nicaragua now than there were before," said Ramírez.

Seventy-five percent of Nicaraguans are living in poverty.

According to Ramírez, the third factor contributing to Ortega's triumph was his strategy of maintaining silence on certain issues during the August to November election campaign.

This was "tied in to people's tendency to view the campaign as a performance put on independently from historical reality," the former vice-president said.

"Nobody stopped to compare Ortega's campaign speeches, and his silence in the media, with what he had said a few months before the campaign, when he called President Bolaños an imperialist 'boot-licker'," he said.

As president, Ortega could behave differently on two fronts: in his foreign relations with, for instance, Venezuela and the United States; and with regard to domestic opponents.

According to Ramírez, on the international stage the president-elect will have no choice but to "call himself a revolutionary and talk of imperialism, but at the same time negotiate with the United States," for example.

Ortega will take over a country in a stable financial condition, with indebtedness under control after the cancellation of more than 80 percent of the foreign debt, a good investment climate, and a free trade treaty with the United States in operation. Agreements with the International Monetary Fund are also being implemented.

"Thirty percent of the national budget is contributed by donations from abroad, and any misstep that shifts the country outside that framework would not be a minor, barely perceptible tremor, but could lead to a real catastrophe, sending the country into the abyss. It would be disastrous, and Ortega knows it," Ramírez said.

Today's international political scene is far different from that of the 1980s.

Back then, "patriotic ideological zeal could lead him into irresponsible excesses, and nobody could calculate the consequences. Now, whoever fails to calculate the consequences is lost, and therefore the only option Ortega has is to form a government that will be, in financial terms, conservative," he said.

The president-elect has promised to place no restrictions on private enterprise and the media, and has contacted Washington's representatives, committing himself to respecting "the rules of democratic fair play."

An alliance with the 12 chambers of business that belong to the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) was announced on Dec. 17, "to combat poverty together, through domestic and foreign investment, in order to generate longterm jobs," in Ortega's words.

On the domestic front, Ramírez predicts that the government will be "populist and manipulative."

"I can't imagine Daniel letting go of his grip on the justice system, for instance, nor allowing any change in the balance of power in the Supreme Electoral Court, nor letting go of his grip on the Comptroller General's Office. Nor do I imagine that he will stop manoeuvring in the National Assembly (parliament) to gain a personal majority there, by buying up deputies from other parties," he said.

The strategic agreement reached in the year 2000 by Ortega and Alemán -- who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for corruption and money-laundering after serving as president from 1997 to 2002 -- allowed Ortega to place loyal Sandinistas in key posts in all the state regulatory and auditing bodies: the Supreme Court, the Supreme Electoral Council, the Comptroller General's Office, and the Public Prosecutor's Office.

"Now we are all obliged to help Daniel Ortega maintain an orderly economy, but we are also obliged to prevent any further concentration of power," Ramírez said.

The opposition "must keep a keen eye on the country's lawful institutions, on civil liberties and freedom of expression, because once a person has a lust for concentrating power, things like freedom of expression tend to take second place," the writer warned.

Political analyst and academic Carlos Tünnermann said that the main challenge faced by the future FSLN government was internal.

Having gained the largest number of seats in parliament, although his supporters are still in the minority, Ortega may resort to his power in other state institutions to force other political parties to negotiate with him from a position of weakness, the analyst told IPS.

But so far, the FSLN has given no signs of negotiating with any of them.

The right has considerable strength in parliament, although it is split. The PLC holds 25 seats, and the ALN 22. By law, outgoing president Bolaños will have a seat, and so will the runner-up in the elections, Montealegre.

The dissident Sandinista Renewal Movement, which Ramírez helped to found, has five.

"The FSLN will seek out the weakest party as an ally to gain an overall majority in the National Assembly. To be precise: it will seek out the PLC and promise to release Alemán in exchange for the conservatives' votes to cancel out the opposition," Tünnermann said.

It is more likely that the PLC and FSLN will renew their 2000 pact to ensure a majority, than that the Sandinistas will be able to attract members of the other opposition parties to vote on their side, he said.

"They reached an agreement before, and now that one of the partners has more power, and certainly more benefits to offer, it wouldn't be at all surprising for Alemán and Ortega to become allies again," he added.