Nicaragua's politics: from a ban on presidential relatives to a co-presidency

Why Nicaragua wrote family succession out of the constitution

The Somoza family held Nicaragua for 43 nonconsecutive years in the twentieth century, and the constitution was one of the instruments it held it with. Anastasio Somoza García took control of the country in 1937, after the National Guard he commanded forced President Juan Bautista Sacasa to resign in June 1936, and Britannica records that he revised the constitution to concentrate power in his own hands. After he was shot in September 1956 his elder son Luis Somoza Debayle was appointed president by the congress and held the office from 29 September 1956 to 1 May 1963, while the younger son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, commanded the Guard.

The younger son's career shows how closely the family worked the text. On 1 May 1972, constitutionally ineligible to succeed himself, Anastasio Somoza Debayle handed the presidency to a triumvirate that included two leaders of his own party. In 1974 he returned to it under a new constitution that permitted him to rule until 1981. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, founded by Carlos Fonseca in 1961 and named for the guerrilla general Augusto César Sandino, drove him out in July 1979. A provisional junta was proclaimed on 19 July 1979 under the 33-year-old Daniel Ortega, and it included Violeta Chamorro, widow of the newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, assassinated on 10 January 1978.

The revolution governed at first under a Statute on Rights and Guarantees, which served as the constitution. A Constituent Assembly elected in 1984 produced the constitution of 1987, which called for regularly held elections, with the first for national office due in 1990. That election was held on 25 February 1990 under careful international observation, and the National Opposition Union, a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties with Chamorro as its candidate, won by 14 points. The handover took place on 25 April. The BTI country report of 2026 dates the first transfer of power in Nicaragua through free and fair elections to that year.

The amendments that followed were negotiated between the executive and the legislature in 1995. They shifted power from the president to the National Assembly, allowed the Assembly to override a presidential veto by simple majority, took away the president's pocket veto, ended conscription and guaranteed private property. They also prevented close relatives of the president from serving in the cabinet or succeeding the president. Thirty years later the constitution would be amended to make the president's wife co-president, and the sections below follow the amendments in between.

How the Nicaraguan constitution divided state power

Article 7 of the Nicaraguan constitution, in its 2014 revision, adds an electoral branch to the usual three. The delegated functions of sovereign power are expressed through the legislative, executive, judicial and electoral branches. The electoral branch has its own chapter. The organisation, management and oversight of elections, plebiscites and referendums belong to it exclusively, and it consists of the Supreme Electoral Council and the bodies beneath it, the council made up of seven members and three alternates elected by the National Assembly.

Article 129 sets out how the four relate. In the 2014 wording they are "independent of one another and coordinate harmoniously, subordinated only to the supreme interests of the nation and to what is established in this Constitution". The verb in that sentence matters later. In the 2014 text the branches coordinate with each other. In the 2025 text one of them coordinates the others.

The legislature has one chamber. The constitution gives the National Assembly ninety members elected by proportional representation, twenty on national lists and seventy in the departments and the autonomous regions. Two more seats go to the outgoing president and to the runner-up in the presidential race, which makes 92.

The text also carries a guarantee about membership of the nation itself. Article 20 reads, in the 2014 version: "No national may be deprived of his/her citizenship." Article 21 leaves the granting, loss and recovery of nationality to be regulated by law. In 2023 a constitutional amendment and a related law allowed the state to strip citizenship from people it designates traitors to the homeland.

What the pact between Alemán and Ortega divided

In January 2000 two leaders who had run against each other agreed a set of constitutional amendments that became known as El Pacto. Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party had beaten Daniel Ortega in October 1996 and held the presidency. Ortega led the Sandinista Front in opposition. The amendments distributed posts in the institutions between their two parties and restricted the room for anyone else.

The Supreme Electoral Council grew from five magistrates to seven, and the change prompted allegations that the two parties were naming their own activists to it and shutting smaller parties out of the electoral process. The Supreme Court, already enlarged from nine magistrates to twelve in 1995, went to sixteen. The share of the vote a presidential candidate needed to avoid a run-off came down from 45% to 40%, or to 35% for a candidate five points ahead of the runner-up. A president could no longer be prosecuted unless the National Assembly lifted the immunity by more than two-thirds of its votes, and the reserved seats for the outgoing president and the runner-up date from the same package.

Enrique Bolaños of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party won in November 2001, again defeating Ortega by 14 percentage points, and Alemán was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to 20 years for embezzlement, money laundering and corruption. In 2004 the Assembly, dominated by the two pact parties, passed reforms that further limited the president's powers, and after the Organization of American States intervened they were deferred to January 2007, when Bolaños's term ended. On 5 November 2006 Ortega returned to the presidency with 37.99% of the vote, enough to win outright under the threshold the pact had lowered. The Carter Center was among the observers who judged that election free and fair.

How Nicaragua removed its limits on re-election

The constitution in force in 2006 banned the immediate re-election of a president and barred anyone from serving more than two terms. Between 2007 and 2009 the main parties discussed a parliamentary system as a legal way for Ortega to stay on after his second term ended in January 2012. The route taken ran through the courts instead. In October 2011 the Supreme Court lifted the ban on consecutive re-election, and Ortega ran and won in November 2011 amid accusations of fraud from the losing candidate, Fabio Gadea Mantilla.

The National Assembly then wrote the change into the text. In January 2014 it approved amendments that removed presidential term limits altogether and dropped the 35% floor, so a plurality was enough. The package also let active-duty police and military officers hold civilian offices and released the president from reporting to the Assembly. Under the 2014 reforms, Freedom House notes, legislators must vote with their party or risk losing their seats.

The 2016 election followed. Opposition parties boycotted it, no international observers were present, and Ortega took more than 72% of the vote. His wife, Rosario Murillo, who had been the government's chief spokesperson, was elected vice president, and Britannica records that as her influence grew the two began to be perceived as co-presidents.

What happened to Nicaraguan elections after the protests

On 18 April 2018 a reform of the social security system that raised contributions and cut benefits set off protests that spread from Managua to other cities. The government rescinded the reform within days. The demonstrations grew over the following months into a general denunciation of the government, which accused the protesters of mounting a coup. The counts of the dead differ by source and date: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recorded at least 212 people killed by 19 June 2018, Freedom House gives at least 328 for the crackdown as a whole and the Wikipedia article on Nicaraguan politics gives 355. The Commission attributed its count to the state's repressive actions. The UN human rights team that reported on the repression was expelled.

In 2020 the Assembly passed three laws that shaped what followed. The Law in Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination for Peace, known as the Sovereignty Law, gave the authorities a broad framework to detain and investigate people and to ban them from running for office or holding it. The Foreign Agents Law was used with it to end the legal status of opposition parties. The Special Cybercrimes Law made dissent easier to criminalise, in the news media and on social media.

From June 2021 those laws were used to arrest more than a dozen opposition figures, among them seven potential presidential candidates, and the Supreme Electoral Council annulled the legal status of several rival parties. The election went ahead in November 2021. The authorities announced that Ortega had won a fourth consecutive term with 75% of the vote on a turnout of 65%; a citizen-run electoral watchdog put turnout closer to 18.5%. The Sandinista Front was declared the winner of 74% of the legislative vote and assigned 75 of the 92 seats. No election monitoring missions were admitted, and the OAS stated that the poll could not meet the criteria for free and fair elections.

The general election scheduled for 2026 was cancelled. On 20 July 2026 Ortega announced that the electoral system would be abolished, saying that "There won't be any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power" and that "The days when parties backed by the Yankees and the Somocistas would return to power are over." Britannica records his stated reason as the need to prevent a return to power of supporters of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. On 1 September 2026 the Assembly approved in first reading a further set of constitutional reforms which, according to the UN Human Rights Office, would exclude organised opposition forces from future electoral competition, postpone elections for the second time until 2028 and extend the mandates of several elected authorities, the presidency among them, to up to seven years.

Who the constitution still counts as Nicaraguan

In February 2023 the authorities released 222 political prisoners, deported them to the United States, declared them "traitors to the fatherland", stripped them of their citizenship and announced that their assets would be subject to confiscation. Two imprisoned presidential candidates were among them. The legal basis was the amendment of that year, against a 2014 wording of Article 20 that no national may be deprived of citizenship. Another 94 people lost their citizenship later the same month.

The measure became a method. Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, arrested in 2022, refused exile to the United States and was sentenced in February 2023 to 26 years in prison, with an order revoking his citizenship; he was expelled in January 2024 with another bishop, 15 clergy members and two seminarians. In September 2024 a further 135 political prisoners were stripped of their citizenship and released to Guatemala, which left them stateless. Some Nicaraguans abroad, and sometimes only their relatives, have become stateless in practice because consulates refuse to renew their passports. The BTI report of 2026 calls the labelling of dissidents as un-Nicaraguan an unprecedented conflation of the party's identity with the state.

The same logic was applied to organisations. On a single day in August 2024 the legal status of 1,500 nonprofit organisations was cancelled. By the UN Human Rights Office's count, published on 16 September 2026, 5,539 entities had been dissolved in the preceding eight years and at least 56 media outlets closed over the same period. Penal code reforms of September 2024 allow the government to prosecute and seize the property of people and organisations accused of crimes against the state even when they are outside Nicaragua.

What the co-presidency reform placed under the presidency

The National Assembly approved the reform that created the co-presidency on 22 November 2024, and it went into effect on 18 February 2025. It created the office of co-president and gave it to Vice President Rosario Murillo. It extended the presidential term from five years to six. It defined Nicaragua as a revolutionary socialist state, raised the flag of the Sandinista National Liberation Front to the status of a national symbol and declared those who transgress the constitution's "principles of security, peace, and wellbeing" to be traitors to the homeland, inside or outside national territory. A new Article 97 made the "volunteer police", the irregular groups that had operated alongside the National Police since 2018, an auxiliary support body of the force.

Its central change is to the relationship Article 129 had described. Under the reform the co-presidency coordinates the legislative, judicial and electoral organs and the National Police. The presidency supervises the electoral office and appoints its president and vice president for six-year terms. Organic Act Number 1259, adopted in 2025, placed key oversight bodies under presidential authority as well. The courts had already been reshaped: at least 900 judges and officials were dismissed in 2023, more than 50 new judges without formal judicial training were appointed in July 2024, and reforms passed in January and May 2024 cut the judiciary's autonomous budget.

The OAS called the reform illegitimate and "an aberrant form of institutionalization" of a "matrimonial dictatorship". In its 2025 report Freedom House scored Nicaragua 2 of 40 for political rights and 12 of 60 for civil liberties. The UN Human Rights Office report of 16 September 2026 recorded one party in control of the legislature, all 153 municipalities and both regional councils of the Caribbean coast. The government's own account runs the other way. Britannica records that it presented the uprising of 2018 to its followers as a foreign-inspired coup attempt against the accomplishments of the Sandinista revolution, and the reform writes the same view into the constitution by naming those who oppose its principles traitors to the homeland.

How the Caribbean coast was given its own government

The eastern half of the country arrived in the state by a different route. The Mosquito Coast was a kingdom under British protection from the seventeenth century until the Treaty of Managua in 1860, and President José Santos Zelaya incorporated it by force in February 1894. Under the revolution the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated the execution of 35 to 40 Miskitos by Sandinista forces in December 1981. In 1987 the National Assembly passed the Autonomy Statute, Law 28, and the constitution, in its 2014 revision, gives the communities of the Atlantic Coast a chapter of their own.

That chapter recognises communal forms of land ownership and the communities' use of the waters and forests on their communal lands, and it guarantees their right to administer local affairs according to their traditions. Under the constitution and the statute, Miskito, Sumo, Rama and Creole English have equal status with Spanish in the eastern regions. Revista Envío put the autonomous territory in September 2003 at approximately 46% of the national territory, 59,673.60 square kilometres, with close to 300,000 inhabitants when the law was passed.

Each of the two autonomous regions, now the North and South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Regions, elects a Regional Council of 45 members in which every ethnic community of the region must be represented. The statute waited 16 years for the regulatory law that made it operable, approved in 2003, and one of the coast leaders the article interviewed, Matilde Lindo, said that 100% of the regional budget came from the central government, so that a council could not meet when the money failed to arrive. The national pattern then reached the coast. Freedom House records that in 2023 the authorities ended the legal status of Yatama, an Indigenous political party, and that in November 2024 officials admitted that two Yatama legislators, Brooklyn Rivera and Nancy Henríquez, missing since late 2023, were in government custody.

Who Nicaragua stands with abroad

Nicaragua has withdrawn from several of the bodies that criticised it. It left from the OAS in November 2023, after the organisation refused to recognise the result of the 2021 election. By 2025 it had also left the FAO, the ILO, the IOM, UNESCO, the UNHCR and the UN Human Rights Council, citing bias, interference and the publication of unfavourable information. The UNESCO withdrawal followed the award of the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to the newspaper La Prensa and the government called the prize a "diabolical expression of a traitorous anti-patriotic sentiment".

The ties it kept run in two directions. Nicaragua formally entered CAFTA-DR, the free trade agreement with the United States, in 2006, and the United States has remained its main trading partner. It re-established relations with the People's Republic of China after breaking with Taiwan, and the National Assembly ratified a free trade agreement with China in November 2023 that took effect in January 2024. On 12 October 2022 it voted against condemning Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. Brazil vetoed its entry to the BRICS group in October 2024.

Lending continued through the crisis. The Central American Bank for Economic Integration lent Nicaragua more than $2 billion between 2018 and 2022, and the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank continued to approve loans.

The International Court of Justice settled a maritime dispute with Honduras in 2007 and one with Costa Rica over the use of the San Juan River in 2009. Territorial disputes are recorded with Colombia over the San Andrés and Providencia archipelago and with Costa Rica over the San Juan boundary, a river whose longer story Nicaragua: history follows.