By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 23, 2006; A12
MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Sixteen years after voters swept Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua's presidency, the former Marxist icon appears to have his best chance yet for a comeback in elections scheduled for Nov. 5.
The bloc of staunch anti-Ortega voters who denied him victory by backing the rightist Liberal Party in three previous elections has been fractured by the recent emergence of popular splinter parties on both the left and the right.
Ortega, 60, whose armed revolution made him the Reagan administration's chief antagonist in the hemisphere during the 1980s, is also getting a boost this time from Washington's current bête noir in Latin America: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Among other shows of support, Chávez recently bypassed Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños and negotiated a deal directly with Ortega to sell oil to Nicaragua under a long-term credit scheme intended to free more government funds for social spending.
Yet in recent elections in Peru and Mexico, Chávez's backing has proved a mixed blessing for the losing candidates. And the shifting political landscape could prove Ortega's undoing if a breakaway Sandinista party, known as the Sandinista Renovation Movement, or MRS, manages to peel off more of Ortega's traditional supporters in the next several months.
The rise of so many strong parties also threatens to upend a long-standing power-sharing pact between Ortega's Sandinistas and the Liberals -- which have largely divvied up control of the National Assembly, the courts and the council of elections supervisors.
"It's a completely unprecedented moment for Nicaragua," said Carlos Chamorro, a prominent journalist and political analyst here, and a son of former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro. "We've always had the pro-Ortega vote and the anti-Ortega vote, and it was always predictable that Ortega would lose. Now we're talking about four competitive parties. The outcome is totally uncertain."
Whiffs of change were evident last week even at one of Nicaragua's most traditional political events, the annual rally held in the capital to commemorate the anniversary of the Sandinistas' 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. As usual, weather-beaten, dewy-eyed veterans of the ensuing civil war against U.S.-funded contra guerrillas turned out in force, pumping their fists as they belted out revolutionary songs to the accompaniment of guitar music. Teenage girls and boys -- far too young to remember the revolution or the contra war -- squealed as Ortega jogged to the podium, looking heavier than when he first marched into Managua at age 33. He sported jeans, a white shirt and a Nicaraguan flag draped over his shoulders in place of military fatigues, but he was still instantly recognizable by his mustache.
When Ortega asked for a moment of silence to honor the most recent Sandinista luminary to die this year, there was an awkward ripple through the crowd. No one needed reminding that Managua's folksy, beloved former mayor, Herty Lewites, 66, had been expelled from the Sandinista party for challenging Ortega and was running for president on the MRS's ticket when he suffered a fatal heart attack earlier this month.
Indeed, so many former Sandinistas have become disaffected with Ortega that for the first time since the revolution they held an alternative anniversary commemoration in the nearby city of Masaya.
"Daniel and his group don't fulfill their promises," Victor Hugo Tinoco, a leading member of the MRS, said in an interview in Managua afterward. "The majority of them have become millionaires. They are now just a powerful economic group whose only goal is to protect its interests by using anti-democratic means to control the party, and by using false leftist speech and inflammatory anti-American rhetoric to gain the support of Nicaraguan society."
Ortega was leading the opinion polls with as much as 30 percent in this nation of 5.6 million people just before the death of Lewites, who had about 17 percent. Much now depends on how many Lewites supporters remain loyal to his successor, Edmundo Jarquín, 59, an economist and former Sandinista diplomat who is politically astute but less known.
Paradoxically, the worst-case scenario for Ortega could be for Jarquín's campaign to fizzle completely. Many of the MRS's voters are centrists who strongly dislike both Ortega and the original Liberal Party and could find a more palatable alternative in Eduardo Montealegre, who heads the breakaway Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance.
Montealegre, 51, appears to be benefiting from the disaffection of many on the right, polling between 22 to 28 percent, compared to Liberal candidate José Rizo's 13 to 21 percent.
The split within the Liberal Party dates to the period shortly after Bolaños took office in 2002, when the new president initiated corruption investigations against his powerful predecessor, Arnoldo Alemán.
Alemán, 60, was convicted in December 2003 and sentenced to 20 years on corruption charges involving $100 million in public funds, but retains formidable influence in the party.
Bolaños, meanwhile, was expelled from the Liberal Party and forced to form the breakaway party. Ever since, he has been fending off efforts by the Liberals and Ortega's Sandinistas -- who control the National Assembly jointly -- to curb his presidential powers and impeach him.
Many Nicaraguans across the political spectrum have grown tired of the power-sharing arrangement between the two parties, known here as el pacto or the pact, saying it has transformed Nicaragua into a false democracy in which the bosses of the two nominally competing parties tolerate each other's corruption.
"They have forgotten us," said Lidia Jimenez, 56, a former voter for the Liberals, who came to hear Montealegre speak in a square in the northern mountain town of Somoto. "We have so many needs, but there is not a single peso out here. . . . That's why four of my children have gone to work in Costa Rica."
Both Ortega and Jarquín propose erasing the debt held by Nicaraguan farmers, subsidizing industries and generally looking for ways to tame what Ortega refers to as "wild capitalism."
But Ortega has sought to make clear that his Marxist days are over, repeatedly touting the value of a "free but just market."
Ortega has also tried to capitalize on the support he has received from Venezuela's Chávez, who, flush with oil wealth, is seeking to expand his brand of populism as a counterweight to U.S. influence in Latin America.
In addition to the oil deal, Chávez has arranged to distribute fertilizer at cut-rate prices to Nicaraguan farmers through an association allied with the Sandinistas.
The oil shipment, meanwhile, has been held up by logistical and financial disputes between Bolaños's government and Venezuela, leading Ortega to complain that he is the only one trying to help the Nicaraguan people.
That claim has resonated in a nation where gasoline is selling for nearly $5 a gallon and where even the capital experiences periodic power outages.
"This oil would be a benefit to the whole country independent of any party. The government is failing us by not accepting it," said Efrain Sequeida, 54, a building contractor who came to the plaza in Managua to hear Ortega speak.
But there are signs that Chávez's assistance could backfire. In a recent poll commissioned by the Nicaraguan weekly Confidencial, 49 percent of Nicaraguans said they thought Venezuela was interfering. And there are rumors that Chávez is directly financing Ortega's campaign -- fueled by the abundance of enormous posters of Ortega's smiling face across not merely the capital but also in the countryside.
"No other candidate has those kinds of resources. Where is he getting it from?" Montealegre asked during an interview on the way to Somoto.
However, the same Confidencial poll also found that 46 percent of Nicaraguans have concerns about interference by U.S. officials -- who have made no effort to hide their distaste for both Ortega and Alemán.
The U.S. ambassador, Paul A. Trivelli, raised eyebrows last spring when he met with members of Montealegre's and Rizo's camps to try to persuade them to reconcile lest they split the anti-Ortega vote.
"Venezuela has been much smarter in its policy than the United States," said Chamorro, editor of Confidencial. "The Venezuelan ambassador keeps a very low profile. . . . By contrast, the United States comes across as arrogant. Trivelli behaves like a political actor who opines almost every day on who should be president."