Democracy Derailed: The 1990 Elections and After

Abstract

Actions by the Nicaraguan political leadership, both before and after the 1990 election, suggest that the participation and grassroots democracy that had been initially envisioned as part of the Sandinista programme were sidetracked in a rush towards a system of representative democracy that the dominant group in the Sandinista leadership hoped would satisfy the United States and its capitalist allies and thus increase the legitimacy of the Nicaraguan government in their eyes. Nor did the Nicaraguan people recover any greater democratic power in the presidential term of Violeta Chamorro (1990–96). Indeed, by July 1995 some 40 per cent of the electorate were so disillusioned with the existing political parties and their leaders and with the political system in general that they were considering not even voting. As one researcher observed after a July 1995 poll, ‘with adults there is despair, deceit, and frustration … people say “I have been deceived, I feel frustrated, I don’t see what good voting is going to do.” As one Managua resident put it, ‘the way we are going, no government does anything’.¹ These feelings were a far cry from the generalized optimism that characterized the vast majority of Nicaraguans in the first years of Sandinista rule. The pages that follow offer an explanation of what went wrong with Nicaragua’s political evolution.