How we got to these “low intensity” elections

A seasoned national electoral observer’s appraisal of the political climate and conditions for voters just five days before the November 4 municipal elections.

Mauricio Zúñiga

If you were to ask me how reliable I think the upcoming municipal elections will be, I’d have to say hardly. And I’m referring to the technical point of view. The degree of trust voters have in the arbiter—in Nicaragua’s case the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) authorities—is determinant in any election. In the past two elections the CSE magistrates haven’t behaved or ruled fairly, transparently or in line with the law, thus generating a crisis we’re nowhere near resolving.

I’ll give you an example. According to a study headed up by communications expert Guillermo Rothschuh on Journalism and Municipal Elections, which analyzed the agenda of the government, opposition and independent media between April and September this year, in the run-up to the elections, 80% of the news on the electoral process referred to the CSE. Only 20% made any mention of voters or of the candidates, their programs, history or qualities.

Something very serious is happening when the crowd at a baseball game is fixing its attention on the ump instead of the best batter or pitcher. Likewise, something’s very wrong if only the arbiter in this municipal election “game” appears in the media day after day after day and is the only one generating expectations rather than the parties, their candidates or the municipal issues.

A political history marked by polarization
rather than by seeking points of agreement

The current electoral game umpire is a product of our recent history. We in Nicaragua have an unresolved problem: the major political actors have divergent visions and perceive themselves as representing counterpoised and mutually excluding models of society. There are two models right now, one represented by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the other by the opposition, which for the most part identifies itself as Liberal, in the European sense of the term. In the past 22 years one of these two models has been excluded from the political and institutional arenas along with its standard-bearers when the other is in power, and each has tried to impose its model on society using whatever mechanism it can, without trying to find points of agreement that would make possible a national consensus in which Nicaragua’s future is put above the interest of the two groups.

Our political parties have a long tradition of using force and coercive cooption measures to impose their model, replacing consensus with serious levels of distrust and mutual de-legitimization within the political class. This rather fundamentalist vision has spread out to society itself, feeding polarization, exclusion and authoritarian ways of acting by certain political sectors. In this polarization, anyone who doesn’t line up behind one or the other is disqualified or suspected of being a potential adversary.

Other countries that have had military conflicts, such as El Salvador, have managed to reach an agreement on basic points to ensure the country’s future. They’ve understood that they can’t beat each other on the battlefield, have agreed to use the electoral path to resolve their contractions and have respected that mechanism.

That level of concertation about the model of society hasn’t been achieved in Nicaragua. Instead, we’ve maintained a kind of low-intensity war between two models of society. And when cyclical crises occur, the political class turns to “governability agreements” or pacts to remodel the country’s institutionality through constitutional reforms that redistribute quotas of power. In little over 150 years of republican history we’ve had 12 political Constitutions and each has had numerous reforms, many of which have been to permit or prohibit reelection. The latest Constitution, from 1987, has already been reformed four times, which reflects the constant readjusting of power quotas. Just between 1990 and now spaces of power have been negotiated and re-negotiated, which has been expressed in cyclical crises between the FSLN and the opposition.

Our history is marked by strong-boss (caudillista) styles of political leadership and by conflicts, wars, coups and revolutions. Our society and its political class haven’t concretized a historical responsibility that would allow them to model a profile of society with basic points of agreement. The first things they lay out are the differences, the disagreements, which is why we’re in the backwardness in which we find ourselves.

A political culture of winner take all

During the counterrevolutionary war of the eighties, the opposition sectors were repressed, denied any space. The 1990 elections came soon after the Sapoá agreements, hammered out by the governing FSLN and the US-financed contra forces. While that kicked off a peace process, the FSLN lost the government in those elections. Following the military conflict, distrust and antagonism prevailed and even grew among different political sectors. While there was peace and a relative disarmament with the end of the war, the confrontation continued to be reflected—but now in reverse to what had happened in the eighties—with the FSLN swept out of all government entities even though it had obtained 41% of the vote compared to the 54% for the winning opposition coalition of no fewer than 14 parties. The traditional political scheme was reproduced yet again: winner takes all and tries to exclude or crush the opponent.

The FSLN charged fraud in the 1996 elections and there were indeed proven expressions of electoral manipulations against it. But the fact that it trailed the winning Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) by a full 14 points meant that the result wouldn’t have changed much even after any irregularities were sorted out. Nonetheless, those admittedly chaotic elections convinced the FSLN that the PLC, which dominated the newly politicized CSE at the time, was maneuvering that institution to limit the FSLN’s possibilities of recovering power via the ballot box. That vision clouded the political climate with more distrust and radicalized the polarization, at the same time whipping up the FSLN’s determination to get institutional spaces any way it could. It sought to modify the correlation of forces by negotiating with the governing PLC through President Arnoldo Alemán, making major inroads in that effort, at the same time that both parties continued a public confrontation between their two models.

Control of the CSE was first prize

The biggest “prize” in that tense and polarized game was control of the Supreme Electoral Council. The first step toward that goal was taken in 1998, with the PLC two years in office, when Alemán signed what he called at the time a “governability agreement” with FSLN secretary general Daniel Ortega, later put into law in the constitutional reforms of 2000. In it those two political forces agreed to establish quotas of power in the state institutions that they would maintain no matter which one of them won the presidency. In the 2001 general elections, the Liberals retained the presidential office with 51% of the votes against the FSLN’s 42% (five points higher than in 1996), but the agreement, or pact, had already assured the FSLN certain institutional spaces. This backroom horse-trading wouldn’t have been so negative had the officials named by the two party leaders to fill those institutions assumed a commitment with the Constitution and the law rather than with their respective party bosses, and had their actions respected the law and buttressed the country’s institutionality. The problem is that many officials are perfectly willing to twist the law to serve the interests of the party—or party leader—that appointed them, thus sending a negative message to society with actions that weaken the rule of law.

The original logic by which the FSLN and the PLC designed the electoral branch was that the sum of two party partialities would generate an impartial institution; i.e. each party appointed two of the five magistrates and the fifth, a protégé of Cardinal Obando, would supposedly be a neutral tie breaker, above party loyalties. That logic might function in countries with a solid democratic culture and a politically acceptable institutionality. But in our country the scheme soon collapsed with the ongoing re-jigging of power quotas and the political class’ intransigent maintenance of two irreconcilable models of society. As a result of the constitutional reform agreed to by Messrs Alemán and Ortega, the electoral branch was one of the main arenas in which the two forces wrestled constantly for quotas of power, thus sparking one crisis after another: the appointed magistrates refused to meet; boycotts by either side meant there was no quorum; they were unwilling to reach agreements, etc.

The CSE should, by nature,
be impartial, not adversarial

They effectively functioned like battling political benches in a polarized legislative assembly even though the electoral branch of government was never conceived as adversarial. In the end the FSLN proved itself the more skilled; using a variety of mechanisms to subordinate wills, it used every possible political trick and maneuver until it finally dominated the electoral branch.

And that’s what we have today: a CSE dominated by the FSLN. The referee has become a player, breaking with the international standards of how such an institution must function by its very jurisdictional nature. In other words, because it must decide between yours and mine it must do so impartially and with equanimity. Instead, what we have is like all of the umpires in the World Series being loyal to the San Francisco Giants and always ruling against the Detroit Tigers: If a Tigers batter hits a line drive the ump always rules it a foul, and each time the Tigers pitcher throws a strike the ump calls it a ball. The very same thing is happening in the CSE: the arbiters are biased in favor of one of the players—and in some cases two—and against all the rest.

The political class needs basic consensus

The political class needs to seek out consensus on some basic issues. Just as the FSLN and the business class have done on economic issues, essential agreements have to be reached between the FSLN and the opposition that can reestablish confidence in the electoral mechanism and strengthen democratic institutionality.

The resolution of power conflicts in a democratic society must take place through clean, fair and transparent elections. In the democratic world, the electoral path is the preferred mechanism for choosing authorities and replacing or reaffirming them. Obviously there’s no perfect electoral system and fraud and irregularities occur in many places. The elections in Russia have been called fraudulent, and in Florida we all remember the electoral fraud that gave George Bush the presidency against Al Gore. But what happened in the United States after that? The people who were unhappy with it said: “He’s not my President, but I trust in the institutions and hope this doesn’t happen again.” They didn’t lose confidence in the institutions which, together with the parties, took measures to ensure that what happened wouldn’t be repeated.

The most serious problem with an electoral system that manipulates and tampers with the vote and doesn’t reverse any illegal or arbitrary actions that are discovered or take corrective measures is that it has a devastating effect on the electorate’s confidence. A vote expresses or channels the minimum quota of sovereign power each citizen has to elect the authorities of his or her choice. When that freely and conscientiously exercised power is manipulated and misappropriated, that abuse, that mockery of their dignity affects people very deeply. And following their protest, if indeed they do protest, their reaction is a loss of confidence in the system’s credibility.

The problems started in 2008

Following our founding in 1990, we in the Institute for Democracy and Development (IPADE) documented international standards in Nicaragua’s elections that, up until 2008, were generally more than acceptable and in fact superior to other Central American countries. We had high levels of participation and a system that generally functioned satisfactorily, with winners and losers accepting the results despite the natural problems of any electoral system.

It was in the November 2008 municipal elections that the CSE gave the first really worrying signs of the exhausting of the system that had been functioning since 2000. The first sign was its refusal to permit national electoral observation. Why would an institution that had always allowed electoral observation suddenly refuse it this time? The second was the manipulation of the results and serious irregularities in at least 14 municipalities. And the third was that these irregularities were the product of collusion between the PLC and the FSLN, which affected the electorate’s faith in the system even more.

Some CSE magistrates publicly admitted to the media that part of the results in those elections had been manipulated and the opposition parties documented and legally challenged the irregularities, but they were never reversed. That rupture in the confidence between the electoral institution and the voters changed the electoral context; the country polarized more and distrust among the parties grew.

Even more “irregularities” in 2011

In last year’s general elections the CSE committed a series of violations of the electoral law before, during and after the voting, all aimed at removing the security locks from the vote and excluding opposition party monitors. Also excluded was any independent national electoral observation. All surveys indicated that the FSLN would be the winner and despite our problems obtaining data given that IPADE wasn’t accredited as an official observer, we did a quick count that indicated to our satisfaction that the FSLN indeed won. It got over 50%, but not the 62% given in the official data.

For the first time in 21 years of electoral history, the CSE refused to publish the results by polling table, as it is mandated by law to do. Also for the first time it failed to report the total number of annulled votes or the number of people who voted at each polling table. It provided the results only by voting center, each of which typically has several tables. That obviously made it impossible to know how the voters at each table had voted and to find where any discrepancies were between the official CSE data on the voting center and the party monitors’ copies of voter tallies, which were by table. In short, there was no way to successfully audit the results. And finally, the CSE presented the provisional data as definitive, violating the electoral calendar for the different steps, and without first resolving any of the challenges presented by the parties. Everything the CSE did was diligent work to hide the information, violating both transparency and the law in the process.

These actions delegitimized and opaqued the governing party’s victory. For all that, we in IPADE didn’t use the word “fraud.” What we said is that there were such grave irregularities we could neither endorse nor certify the official results given the CSE’s effort to hide the most basic information and thus wrest transparency and legitimacy away from the results and the official winner. The “official” result doesn’t necessarily represent legality and social legitimacy; for that to exist, what is needed is for everyone, winners and losers alike, to recognize that they won or lost fair and square, with an impartial judge that everyone respects for having refereed a good game.

We need a new institutionality
that everyone can trust

Nicaragua came into these municipal elections without the conditions to ensure they would be transparent because an elemental guarantee in any election is having an impartial arbiter that everyone trusts, and we don’t have that. Even so, we did still respect the right of all parties that registered, all candidates who registered and the population that decided to endorse those candidacies with their vote. In IPADE we called on people to participate, to have a presence, whether as voters, members of a voting table or party monitors. We called on them to show up at the polling places because in a democratic system, abandoning the spaces, caving into apathy and indifference creates a vacuum that’s filled by authoritarianism.

The electoral road is the only civic mechanism for resolving political differences and renewing the power of the authorities. The other mechanism, the one we lived through tragically at the end of the seventies and in the eighties is violence, and we wouldn’t wish it on anybody. We believe that the political class that designed today’s institutionality, with its system of power quotas in the public institutions, ought to sit down and design a new institutionality that all of society’s actors can trust.

Today, the country’s electoral institutionality, which is a very sensitive area for society as it’s the one in which the parties compete for hegemony, has been upset. It should be reformed with arbiters who are trusted by everyone, including activists in or sympathizers with both the governing party and the opposition parties, as well as activist abstainers and those who only sympathize with indifference. All citizens deserve reliable institutions, legitimate and legal authorities, and satisfied winners and losers because that’s the bedrock for building a healthy society, reducing intolerance, promoting values and establishing a transparent, inclusive and ethical system that respects differences and the rights of both majorities and minorities.

Some years ago IPADE and several other social organizations proposed reforms to the Electoral Law. It’s a technically and juridically viable proposal that has been in the hands of parliamentarians of all parties for some years now, but there’s no political will to make far-reaching reforms. Our proposal is constructive, beneficial to both society and the parties themselves, and would reestablish confidence in the electoral path. For obvious reasons it starts with replacing all the existing electoral arbiters.

The pattern of municipal
elections since 1990

These are Nicaragua’s sixth municipal elections since 1990, when the elected municipal government system was initiated. Since then we’ve held them in 1996—together with the national elections that year—then in off years in 2000, 2004 and 2008, since the presidential/legislative elections are now every five years and the municipal elections every four. They will again coincide with the general elections in 2016.

In 1990 the UNO (National Opposition Union), which ran Violeta Chamorro as its presidential candidate, won 99 of the 131 mayoral seats to the FSLN’s 32. The number of municipalities has since grown by 22, to 153. Back when the CSE was still generally respecting the law, albeit functioning with problems, the FSLN consistently built on the 32 mayoral seats it got in 1990. It won 52 even in the chaotic elections of1996, repeated that number in 2000 and increased it to 87 in 2004 when it ran in a coalition that included the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS). Meanwhile, the PLC, which was the governing party between 1997 and 2002, saw its municipal winnings shrink to 57 mayoral seats by 2004, with the other 8 seats divided among three other parties. In the highly questioned 2008 elections, the FSLN obtained 109 mayoral seats, the National Liberal Alliance (ALN) [whose founding leader Eduardo Montealegre had by then been arbitrarily removed by the CSE and replaced with a Liberal beholden to the FSLN], got 39 and the PLC only 4.

The ins and outs of voter turnout

Voter turnout is always lower in municipal elections than in national ones. The country’s destiny is at stake in a national election, in which the programs, governing style and even ideology and very system of government could change. This polarizes people and draws them out to vote. Nicaragua has very high participation rates in national elections, averaging around 70% of registered voters and in some cases reaching 75-76%. Historically, the highest in municipal elections have been 56-57%. In 2008, 2.19 million people voted (56%).

These high turnout rates in Nicaragua’s general elections have to do with our electoral system of domiciliary voting. Unlike the rest of Central America, voters in urban areas have to walk no more than eight blocks, while those in rural areas have to go no more than four miles to get to their voting place. This means that some 4,000 voting centers and a little more than 13,000 voting tables have to be organized for a typical turnout of between 150 and 350 at each. While each table has to prepare for a set ceiling of 400 voters, it generally isn’t that high as the electoral rolls haven’t been cleaned. This system is more complex and thus costs more because it requires more personnel, organization and logistics and also requires the parties to have a more extensive electoral network, but it makes greater civic participation possible.

There was virtually no increase in voters in last year’s national elections. The 2.66 million turnout only exceeded 2006 by some 150,000 voters, less than half the average increase of around 333,000 voters every five years. This stagnation seemed to indicate that an important sector of the electorate was staying away from the polls after what had happened in 2008, which increased the distrust or apathy surrounding elections. The abstention rate seems to have come mainly from the traditional opposition, those firmly opposed to the current governing party. Their vote had been the majority in 1990, 1996 and 2001 (55% vs. 41%, 51% vs. 38% and 56% vs. 42%, respectively), until the FSLN managed to win in 2006 with only 38% due to the split in the Right, with the PLC only winning 27% and the then new ALN under Montealegre’s leadership beating it out for second place by a point.

Much of the FSLN’s increased vote is real

There are now new indications that that solid anti-FSLN vote has become more porous, suggesting a structural change in the population’s political sympathies. It’s worth investigating whether this is associated with the fact that the same discredited electoral referees are still running the electoral branch of government. In a recent national poll, 37% of those surveyed declared themselves “independent,” stating that they don’t support any party, while 40% declared themselves FSLN sympathizers and barely 8% identified with or endorsed any of the opposition parties.

The FSLN’s greater political returns in the local governments after 1990 were due to its ongoing work in the territories. Before 2006, when the FSLN returned to national government, its advances were based on good administrations in the municipal governments it ran, on having mayors of recognized probity who executed agendas hammered out with the population, and on work that incorporated people’s priority needs into the municipal development and investment plans. The FSLN also made advances through its increasingly skilled labor of forging electoral alliances: with the Resistance, the evangelical parties, Cardinal Obando, indigenous sectors such as Yatama, and certain youth sectors. Thus its political work was being reorganized and modernized in its own way. At the same time the FSLN maintained ongoing, systematic work with the population around the clock, making it a party with a much more tightly woven organic network than any of the other parties, which usually only work during the electoral campaigns and have also been battered by splits.

Anticipated outcome

The parties running in the municipal elections on November 4 are the FSLN, which pulled 1.5 million votes in 2011; the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), which together with the other forces in the PLI Alliance got nearly 800,000; the PLC 140,000; the ALN 10,000 and APRE 6,000. One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to see that the FSLN will be the winning party. The surprise would be any other result. It is indisputable that with the economic resources available to it, its organizational capacity and territorial work and its positive accumulated economic management in government, the FSLN will be able to consolidate the municipal mayor’s offices it already runs and likely win more.

The opposition is not only divided, but is competing for the very same voters. Their votes will be divided between the PLC and the PLI in the territories where the Liberals have always predominated. Moreover, Yatama is strong in some Caribbean coast municipalities, particularly in the northern area.

Factors suggesting a low turnout

In a context of such generalized distrust of the arbiter and such predictable results, many are questioning whether it’s even worth bothering to go vote. But as the situation differs in each municipality, making it like 153 different elections, there will also be municipalities in which the population wants to vote and doesn’t care how partial or impartial the arbiter is.

Given the 2.45 million votes cast in last year’s general elections respectively for the FSLN, the PLI and the PLC, we can estimate that some 60% of those voters may turn out to vote for those same parties. But as it’s very possible that fewer will vote, we can consider it a successful participation but if we hit 2 million votes. If participation is 53% of registered voters, it could still be considered statistically normal for municipal elections.

Various factors could influence a possibly lower participation in these elections. Five are listed below.
Undemocratic candidate selection. The first factor is the FSLN candidates for mayor in at least 40 municipalities that weren’t the ones endorsed by the part rank-and-file, activists and local leadership but were rather handpicked by the presidential couple, sparking severe contradictions. No matter now disciplined a party may be, this type of conflict is frequently resolved with a punishment vote for another party or with abstention. This could conspire against participation by followers of the country’s most organized party.

The FSLN had hoped to resolve this internal problem by reiterating the message that these elections are about choosing a project, not individuals. But that idea contradicts the spirit of municipal elections, in which the candidate’s face and qualities, both of which the local population knows, are fundamental to the electorate. The FSLN’s orientation has been to close ranks and line up behind the party and its leader. Will this instruction hold or will the contradictions get expressed?

A split, weakened and vacillating opposition. The second factor possibly leading to less participation is the opposition’s weaknesses. The PLI, which came in second in 2011, is going into these elections with both its leadership and its organizational fabric weakened because the MRS, which was its ally in 2011 and has a solid territorial network, isn’t participating this time and in fact has urged people not to vote. Moreover, the PLI vacillated over whether or not to run before finally deciding to do battle, claiming that it had strengthened its organization and won greater experience. It is focusing on the anti-Sandinista corridor that starts high in the country’s northern region, comes down through Jinotega and Matagalpa, continues through Boaco, Chontales and Nueva Guinea and spreads out through the mountainous part of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region and most of the South Atlantic Autonomous Region.

There will surely be more participation in this corridor and it will favor the opposition, because these are the rural areas where anti-Sandinista tempers heat up easily. A field study we did in those areas showed that the CSE had processed fewer voter ID cards there and given fewer temporary voting documents so that those who didn’t get their ID cards could vote anyway. According to this study, 40,000 people who appeared on the voter rolls as having their cards couldn’t vote as they in fact received neither the card nor the temporary voting document. Some 70% of them live in that corridor the PLI is counting on, where Liberalism has always predominated. A week and a half before these municipal elections the CSE announced that it had produced 204,000 ID cards and 88,551 temporary documents, more than confirming our study’s findings. It also announced that it was sending them out for distribution…

The same discredited electoral authorities are still there. The third factor is that the electoral authorities haven’t been changed. I believe this is a policy, a government strategy precisely to provoke abstention in the opposition sectors, to dissuade those who fear their vote will be manipulated again, even though the CSE may not need to do so in these elections. Whether or not there are more “irregularities” this time around, people’s confidence has already taken a major hit.

Local governments have been weakened. The fourth factor that could reduce participation is that the tendency of municipal elections to lack the mobilizing and tension-producing effect of presidential elections is even stronger now that the central government’s re-concentrating of power has weakened municipal autonomy and hence the local government’s ability to resolve the population’s problems.

Since 2007 the local governments have been competing with the Councils of Citizens’ Power and Cabinets of Citizens’ Power, which are the protagonists of the emerging model of participation created by the Ortega government. The CPCs and GPCs, as they are respectively known, are now the “natural” liaisons for any municipal government initiative with any central government ministry, be it health, education, transport, infrastructure… And any initiative or negotiation that a non-FSLN mayor wants or needs to engage in with the central government will go nowhere if it doesn’t first get the endorsement of that municipality’s respective GPC. In some municipalities this has obliged the establishment of levels of concertation between the two models, while in others polarization and exclusion have been the rule of the day, making it more difficult to find answers to the population’s needs.

The campaigns have no passion. One last factor that could lower participation is the weak and virtually imperceptible campaigns by the parties. There was little evidence of the kind of motivation or passion displayed in other campaigns and much less money seemed to be spent on the campaigns than in previous years, including by the governing party.

Buying votes with social handouts

The one campaign tactic the FSLN maintained was the central government’s social programs, which some see as highly clientelist, successfully consolidating party loyalty. Programs such as Zero Usury, Zero Huger, the Solidarity Bonus and the Roof Plan satisfy a large segment of the poor. Even for those who don’t get any goodies—as the impact of these programs has limited coverage among the poor—their ongoing use generates expectations that they could get the brass ring the next time around.

These programs have worked very well in generating sympathies for the governing party. There are diverse critical opinions of their effectiveness as social programs and of their manipulative characteristics, but the undeniable reality is that other governments have had the resources to do similar or even better things, but haven’t done it. In a socioeconomic study by IPADE in 2009 on the impact of these policies in the rural areas of extremely poor municipalities in Matagalpa, Jinotega, Madriz and the North Atlantic, we found a satisfaction level of over 80% with the FSLN government’s health and education policies.

I’ve personally heard beneficiaries of the government’s social programs say things like this: “They are taking us into account for the first time”; “no one else has come back to see me in the past 20 years”; “no government ever paved my street; I don’t know how many winters slogging through the mud and now the FSLN’s done it”; or “I was a combatant and no one did anything for me, and now they’re giving me sheet metal to roof my house”… and more. Those 10 sheets of metal roofing, a chicken, a pregnant cow, an 800-córdoba bonus when their kids graduate from high school, a gas stove… all mean a lot to most poor people.

In a country with a strong party-boss tradition in which people are manipulated in all campaigns, promised things with no follow-through, the FSLN is maintaining an umbrella of social programs in which it actually brings something to some sectors, and that translates into support. We can’t sneer at the effect of these policies on those who receive them directly or on those who maintain the hope of being selected for them in the future.

Unaccredited election observation

It is in this political scenario that we’re coming up to the municipal elections. IPADE has organized a network of 1,300 voluntary observers in 110 municipalities and all of them have been monitoring the conditions leading up to election day. They’ve already reported on how many citizens showed up several months ago to verify where they’re supposed to vote and how that process went; on the attention provided to the population by the Municipal Electoral Councils; on the issuing of ID-voter cards and temporary documents; on respect for campaign ethics, etc. We won’t be officially observing to see who wins in each of the 153 elections, but we will be monitoring the quality of the election and whether the basic guarantees are provided. It will be up to the parties and their monitors to verify the results of the ballot count at each voting table.

We didn’t get authorization from the Supreme Electoral Council to observe. In fact, the words “electoral observation” didn’t even appear on the electoral calendar. For the first time in 20 years electoral observation regulations weren’t even published. Instead we’ll do our work protected by our constitutional right to participate in all public affairs and hope we won’t be subjected to any type of intimidation or threats, as we were in 2011. Our observers will go into the voting center to cast their vote and while doing so will observe whether the basic, legally-established guarantees are being met. They’ll also observe from outside and will report what they saw based on a universal methodology using certain indicators to qualify the election.

These are low-intensity elections. The parties’ campaigning has been weak or even nonexistent in many places. The projection of the municipal candidates has been very limited and the electoral programs in the municipalities have barely been publicized. Even so, we remain convinced that we must work to create the right conditions for Nicaragua to recover its confidence in the electoral institutionality by November 2016, when municipal elections again coincide with the national ones and hopefully the political conditions in which we have to work now will have changed.

We also hope that after these elections the nation’s political leadership will assume the commitment to strengthen democracy with electoral authorities that generate confidence and legitimacy in all of society and not only in one party. We hope the conditions will exist for a real concertation that enables conciliation between the two counterpoised models of society.

Mauricio Zúñiga is the executive director of Nicaragua’s Institute for Development and Democracy (IPADE), an NGO whose work includes electoral observation.

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