A republic with the lights off by Mia Rodríguez

There is a political joke that stops being funny when everyone understands it. Daniel Ortega appears to have delivered one. If Nicaragua is to have no more elections capable of allowing the opposition to win power, then the country has crossed the line that separates an unpleasant democracy from something much simpler: a dictatorship with administrative stationery.

Modern autocracy rarely announces itself with a trumpet. He need not abolish parliament, burn the constitution in the town square, or send tanks clattering down the avenue. He keeps the offices, the flags, the ceremonies and, occasionally, the ballot boxes. What disappears is the possibility that any of these things might produce an inconvenient result.

Elections are useful to authoritarian governments for precisely this reason. They provide scenery. They make power look procedural. A government can point to polling stations and say: Look, the people have spoken. The question is whether people may say anything the government has not already approved.

Ortega’s Nicaragua has been travelling down this road for years, and the depressing part is not that the destination is mysterious. It is that the journey has become so familiar. Opposition figures are harassed or imprisoned, independent media are squeezed, civil society is dismantled, and institutions that might restrain the executive are steadily brought to heel. The regime presents the resulting silence as stability.

That is the oldest authoritarian misunderstanding of peace. A cemetery is stable too. The Sandinista revolution once claimed the language of emancipation, sovereignty and popular power. There is Shakespearean bleakness in watching a movement born against dictatorship turn the state into a fortress around itself. Revolutions often begin by promising that nobody will again possess unchecked power. Their tragedy is that some eventually discover how convenient unchecked power can be.

Ortega’s defenders may invoke foreign interference, Washington’s history in Central America, national security or opposition incompetence. Some contain genuine historical grievances. Nicaragua has suffered from outside meddling and internal violence. But history is not a lifetime exemption from accountability. A government cannot claim sovereignty for itself while denying sovereignty to its own citizens.

Nor can elections be reduced to a ritual performed every few years for the benefit of foreign observers. Their essential purpose is not to decorate government with legitimacy. It is to make government vulnerable to replacement. Remove that possibility and the ballot becomes theatre, and citizenship becomes audience participation.

The most disturbing consequence is psychological. Once people understand that voting cannot change power, they stop expecting politics to change anything. Cynicism becomes habitual. Fear becomes practical. Silence becomes a survival skill. A dictatorship does not merely control institutions; it tries to colonise imagination, persuading citizens that alternatives are forbidden and rendered politically almost impossible.

That is why Nicaragua’s crisis is larger than Ortega. The real danger is creating a political culture in which the absence of choice is mistaken for national destiny.

A country without competitive elections may still possess ministries, courts, police, schools and official speeches. What it lacks is the one institution that makes rulers temporary. And once rulers cease to be temporary, they stop being elected leaders. They become owners.

That is the moment when a republic has gone dark, even if every government building remains brightly lit.