Nicaragua elects former president Ortega
As election officials finished the final vote tallies in Nicaragua on Tuesday and his leading opponent conceded defeat, Daniel Ortega, the onetime cold-war nemesis of the United States, was assured of winning the presidency here and fulfilling his 16-year struggle to regain power.
With 91 percent of the vote counted from Sunday’s balloting, Mr. Ortega led five other candidates with 38 percent of the vote, while the second-place candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, a conservative, trailed with 29 percent, election officials said Tuesday night. The third-place candidate, José Rizo, received 26 percent.
“With his triumph, he has taken on an enormous responsibility,” Mr. Montealegre, a 51-year-old Harvard-trained banker, said as he stepped aside moments after the results were announced. “He has to govern democratically.”
Mr. Ortega, who is 60, maintains that both he and the country have changed since the 1980s, when he was a hard-line Marxist president accepting Soviet aid and fighting a United States-backed insurgency. The cold war is over, and Nicaragua’s economy now depends heavily on exports to the United States and free markets.
While Mr. Ortega still rails against “savage capitalism” and the failure of free trade to alleviate poverty, he has become a more pragmatic leftist over the past decade and a half. Gone is the fiery Marxist oratory, replaced with talk of reconciliation, peace and God. He has traded his anti-American campaign songs for John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.”
He has also become openly religious, regularly attending church and often asking people at his rallies to pray. He even pushed through a bill to ban abortion recently, in part to attract Catholic support.
Still, no one is sure how much of the change in Mr. Ortega’s political outlook is real. Many business leaders and political analysts say the future of this impoverished country may hinge not just on whether Mr. Ortega’s style has evolved, but whether Nicaragua’s democracy is strong enough to keep a leftist president with an authoritarian past in check.
“If he hasn’t changed, he will have to change, because it’s not the same Nicaragua in 2006 as the Nicaragua in which he came to power at the head of a revolutionary movement,” said Carlos Tunnerman, a political analyst.
The United States has made it clear that it does not like the prospect of its cold war foe returning to power, especially in light of Mr. Ortega’s close relationship with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Still, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States would respect the decision of the Nicaraguan people and see what policies the next government follows before making decisions about future relations. Bush administration officials had threatened before the vote to suspend aid if Mr. Ortega won.
Former President Jimmy Carter monitored the polling here and said the election was clean and fair. He said Mr. Ortega had given him assurances Monday night that he would respect property rights, civil liberties, free enterprise and the free trade agreement with the United States.
nytimes
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