Nicaragua's lawmakers said Tuesday they will carry out President Daniel Ortega's plan to abolish elections in the Central American country, a move announced by the National Assembly, which is firmly controlled by Ortega and his wife and co-president Rosario Murillo. The assembly said the latest constitutional reform will ensure the country's “peace, security and stability.”
Who Holds the Levers
The legislature was following up on Ortega's announcement over the weekend that “here there will be no more elections,” a declaration that reflected both his effort to extend his nearly 20-year rule and to eliminate any chance for the opposition to reach power. That is the machinery speaking plainly now. The people at the top are not hiding the direction of travel. They are taking the vote off the table.
Under Ortega, the government has carried out a broad crackdown on dissent after the violent suppression of 2018 protests. Authorities have jailed opposition politicians, religious leaders and others, and have also shut down thousands of civil society organizations. Those are the costs of rule from above. The people who challenge power, organize outside it, or build anything independent of it get crushed by the apparatus.
The National Assembly has repeatedly amended the constitution to concentrate power in Ortega's hands and remove any trace of democratic independence and dissent in the country. Ortega's comments on Sunday, during a speech marking the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, effectively canceled the next elections. The vote had originally been scheduled for November 2027, after the National Assembly voted in January 2025 to extend the five-year presidential term by one year.
What They Call Stability
The assembly said the latest constitutional reform will guarantee “peace, security and stability.” That language does a lot of work. It dresses up the removal of elections as order, while the state keeps tightening its grip and narrowing the space for anyone outside the ruling circle.
Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, strongly condemned the developments in Nicaragua on Wednesday and said that “all people, of all political views, must be able to vote and run for public office.” He said in a statement that “these latest developments further deepen the severe restrictions on fundamental freedoms, the dismantling of civic space and the ongoing erosion of the rule of law.”
Those words land against the reality already described by the same report: jailed opposition politicians, jailed religious leaders, thousands of shuttered civil society organizations, and a legislature that keeps rewriting the rules to concentrate power. The reform language may sound procedural. The effect is blunt.
The International Chorus
The Nicaraguan government declined to comment on the criticism and said in a statement: “Thank you for your interest.” Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, said Tuesday that the move by Ortega and Murillo “lays bare their true authoritarian nature.” He said in a statement that “the United States urges the international community to join forces to show the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship that it cannot maintain relations as if nothing were happening with other nations while it frustrates the basic principles of our democratic hemisphere.”
Washington's own record in the region sits awkwardly beside that rhetoric. The government of President Donald Trump, despite harsh words, sanctions and repeated criticism, has taken few major steps against Managua. In nearby El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, has also weakened democratic checks and attacked critics, Washington has largely praised the leader.
That’s the old script: condemn one strongman, excuse another, and call it principle. Meanwhile, the people in Nicaragua face a political order where the assembly serves Ortega and Murillo, dissent has been battered, and elections are being erased by decree.
The AP photo with the story showed Nicaraguan police taking a photo with President Daniel Ortega in Masaya, Nicaragua, on July 13, 2018. The image sits there like a snapshot of the arrangement: police, president, and power posing together while the rest of the country gets told this is stability.