Riots threaten Nicaragua’s autocratic president
AMONG Latin America’s handful of autocracies, that of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua once stood out for its stability. Mr Ortega was the most prominent leader of the revolutionary Sandinista regime of the 1980s, but lost an election in 1990. He later forged a dirty deal with a conservative rival that let him return to power with just 38% of the vote in 2006, and has since clung to office by nobbling democratic institutions. At the last election in 2016, he banned the main opposition. Nicaragua thus joined Venezuela, the only two Latin American countries to have regressed from democracy to dictatorship.
Mr Ortega rules by combining left-wing rhetoric with mainly right-wing policies, letting the private sector and the Catholic church do what they like and avoiding quarrels with the United States. He has kept his political base among the poor thanks to roughly $5bn in Venezuelan aid. He has made his wife, Rosario Murillo, vice-president. Corruption has flourished. All this carries a whiff of the...