An Overseen Presidential Election in 2016

With the whole world on top of these coming US elections, I had forgotten Nicaragua’s [my home country] presidential elections are also happening this coming November. Do I just care more about the country in which I’ve been living for the past 3 years? Johnson would agree with me in that it has nothing to do with a lack of patriotism or moral responsibility. Through Johnson’s Rational Abstention model, we were able to conclude that the costs of voting are higher than the benefits, and that people vote because they derive some utility from voting and to minimize the maximum potential regret from abstaining. However, this theory assumes no other external costs/obstacles, like faulty institutions. Nonetheless, in Nicaragua, like many other Latin American countries, this obstacle has a lot of weight on many Nicaraguans’ decision to abstain from voting.


Current Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega (from the socialist National Sandinista Liberation Front party), changed the country’s constitution last year, for the second time, to run for re-election for his third consecutive period. Fortunately for Ortega, Nicaragua’s National Assembly “randomly decided” to destitute the now ex-candidate of the Independent Liberal party (opposition), Luis Callejas, together with 28 congressmen from the same party. The reason: A legal dispute against the Liberal party that started back in 2007 and that was “suddenly” brought up to court earlier this year; during the least appropriate time. Weird huh? Well, the list of random incidents keeps going. It was decided (there’s still a debate over who really made this decision) that the new candidate of the Liberal party would be Pedro Reyes a.k.a The Stranger. To be fair to Mr. Reyes, the Supreme Electoral Court accepted his request to dismiss the few congressmen left of the opposition party who did not accept his leadership. I know this post is already too long, but to end the list I want to put one more fun-fact out there. Ortega’s vice-president became ill earlier this year, which forced him to relinquish to his position, leaving the first Sandinista congresswoman as the new vice-president. Any guesses? None other than his wife, Rosario Murillo.


There’s no doubt 2016 was by far the luckiest year for Daniel Ortega.