General Elections of 2011
Presidential and National Assembly elections are held together at the same time every five years. National elections, Presidential and Legislative, are scheduled for November 2011. Municipal elections are held every four years, and are scheduled for 2012. As Nicaragua moves toward another cycle of elections, there were a number of constraints and challenges that require attention in order to improve the transparency and integrity of the electoral process.
In order to achieve a political majority after winning the Presidency with just 37 percent of the vote in 2006, the FSLN in government worked incredibly hard to achieve the electoral win in 2011 with 63 percent of the vote. On April 5, President Ortega issued a decree redistricting three municipalities from the RAAS to the neighboring pro-FSLN department of Chontales. Opposition parties, constitutional experts, and electoral observers labeled the decree illegal, as it lacked the mandated legislative approval, and declared it politically motivated, as it reapportioned votes to benefit the FSLN in the November election. The decree was under appeal at year’s end, but it was reported that the votes of the three municipalities were included with Chontales in the election.
On 06 November 2011, President Ortega was reelected in elections that both international and domestic observers characterized as highly irregular and nontransparent. The EU, the Organization of American States (OAS), and domestic observation missions reported significant concerns with the CSE’s approval of a disproportionate amount of FSLN poll watchers and a denial of opposition party access to critical electoral stations. The OAS expressed concern over irregularities related to the accreditation of approximately 9,000 opposition poll watchers and reported that OAS observers were denied access to several voting centers.
The domestic observation group Ethics and Transparency reported that up to 150,000 votes were fraudulently altered by the CSE to ensure that the FSLN obtained an additional eight to 12 seats in the National Assembly, which would assure the party’s legislative control. Voting results were not published by the CSE at the polling station level, leading observation groups to deem the results unverifiable. Violence related to the highly irregular nature of the elections left five citizens dead, including three opposition members and two FSLN political secretaries in the RAAN.
Prior to the November 2011 elections, NGOs raised a number of concerns about the electoral process, including the politicized issuance of cedulas; preferential treatment of FSLN members at voting centers, including the enrollment of underage FSLN voters; threats against poll watchers of the observation group Institute for Development and Democracy (IPADE); a series of new, restrictive observation regulations issued by the CSE; and the CSE’s denial of official accreditation to several domestic electoral observation groups.
In 2011, national elections led to widespread demonstrations and political rallies in Managua. Violence also escalated in rural communities. Confrontations between the largest political parties erupted along main thoroughfares and locked down Managua for brief periods. The use of riot control, mortars, and rocks as well as sheer numbers of people led to some precarious situations.
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