Ortega ends elections in Nicaragua, and Belize should pay attention

By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): A member of Belize’s own regional family has formally abandoned the ballot box. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has announced that the Central American country will no longer hold elections, eliminating any electoral challenge when his term ends next year and further entrenching the rule he shares with his wife, co-president Rosario Murillo.

“There won’t be any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power,” the 80-year-old declared Sunday evening, according to international reports, in a speech commemorating the 1979 Sandinista revolution. “The days when parties backed by the Yankees and the Somocistas would return to power are over, never again.” It was his first public appearance in two months, and he offered no details on how the ban would be carried out.

The path to this moment has been long and dark. Ortega has held power continuously since 2007, following an earlier term in the 1980s. His last reelection in 2021 was widely disputed after opponents and business leaders were detained and dissent criminalized. Constitutional reforms last year named Murillo co-president and extended the presidential term to six years, with the couple controlling the armed forces and judiciary. The United Nations Human Rights Council has accused the government of transforming Nicaragua into an authoritarian state, and a 2018 crackdown on protests left more than 300 people dead. The United States has sanctioned more than 2,350 Nicaraguan officials and their relatives.

Reaction from the exiled opposition was swift. Felix Maradiaga, a former presidential hopeful jailed from 2021 to 2023 before being expelled to the United States, told Reuters the announcement was less a show of force than “a confession of fear.” Analyst Tiziano Breda said the couple has opted to “eliminate electoral competition altogether” rather than stage another rigged vote, describing Nicaragua as a full-fledged, family-run dictatorship.

For Belize, this is not a distant story. Nicaragua sits alongside Belize in the Central American Integration System, the regional body through which the two countries share summits, agreements, and a common neighbourhood. The contrast between the two members could hardly be sharper: since independence, Belize has held regular free elections with peaceful transfers of power between parties, a democratic record that now stands out ever more starkly in a region under authoritarian strain. Nicaragua’s turn also carries practical weight for the region, having already driven waves of Nicaraguans into exile across Central America in recent years.

Belize’s government has not commented on the announcement, and small states in the region traditionally tread carefully on their neighbours’ internal affairs. But as the hemisphere digests the formal end of elections in a SICA member state, the moment stands as a reminder Belizeans need no lecture on: the vote, wherever it survives, is never to be taken for granted.

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