By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and JILL REPLOGLE
NYT Article...
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Nov. 6 — Sixteen years after he left power, Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist president and the Sandinista leader who is still regarded as a sworn foe by many in Washington, appeared headed to a victory on Monday in the Nicaraguan presidential election.
Though electoral officials had yet to release final tallies from Sunday’s vote, preliminary results and the country’s electoral watchdog groups all indicated that Mr. Ortega, who had failed three times before to gain the presidency in elections, would win a clear victory.
An Ortega win in a five-way race would be a defeat for the Bush administration, which strongly opposed his election and worked hard to unite a fractious opposition against him with little success. The White House has said it would withdraw aid from an Ortega government.
With about 61 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Ortega had 38.6 percent of the ballots, about 8 points ahead of the second-place candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, a Harvard-educated financier and conservative Washington has openly supported. Final results were not expected until Tuesday, an election official said.
Now 60 years old and balding, Mr. Ortega has maintained he is no longer a Marxist, but more of a pragmatist. He has promised to keep good relations with the United States and chose a former political opponent as his running mate. He has also vowed to help the poor and run a positive campaign around the themes of “peace, love and unity.”
But he maintains close ties to Cuba and to Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the leftist president who has become a thorn in the side of the United States. Mr. Chávez gave the Ortega campaign significant support by sending subsidized oil to Nicaragua and distributing it through Sandinista politicians.
Mr. Ortega’s expected victory appeared to be another gain for leftists in Latin America, who, despite recent setbacks in Peru and Mexico, have also persuaded voters to abandon conservative governments in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.
Although the results were preliminary, supporters of the Sandinista National Liberation Front party of Mr. Ortega set off fireworks around the city on Monday, and drove around honking horns, shouting victory slogans and waving red and black Sandinista flags. Mr. Ortega had yet to make a statement.
Cuba immediately congratulated Mr. Ortega. “This is good for the people of Nicaragua and for the integration of Latin America,” Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque told The Associated Press on Monday.
Mr. Ortega’s opponents refused to recognize his expected victory until all the votes were counted. The United States took a similar stance. The State Department’s deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, said Monday that the administration would wait to comment until the Nicaraguan electoral council announced who won. He also said it was too early to comment on procedural problems during the voting, noting that several groups of observers planned to file reports.
Mr. Casey said the United States delegation in Nicaragua had remarked on “high turnout and given praise to the Nicaraguan people for their patience and their willingness to show support for this democratic process.”
Mr. Ortega was one of the leaders of the Sandinista rebels that swept to power in 1979, toppling the Somoza dynasty of right-wing dictators friendly to the United States and setting up an authoritarian left-wing government.
With the cold war still driving United States policy, President Reagan imposed sanctions on the country and financed anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as contras, in part by secretly selling arms to the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. It was Mr. Ortega who led his Soviet-backed government in a bloody decade-long civil war.
The last time Mr. Ortega ran Nicaragua, he seized private assets and redistributed land to peasants. Capital fled the country, along with many of its business leaders. He vows a different approach this time.
The advertising campaign against the former rebel leader was vicious, showing images from the civil war, women weeping, guns blaring. His opponents lost no chance to remind people of the economic collapse that followed the fighting and the United States embargo.
Mr. Ortega was elected president in 1984 and served from 1985 to 1990, before losing to Violeta Chamorro. He struggled to regain power through the ballot box, but without success, in 1996 and 2001.
This time, however, a change in the election law and a strong throw-the-bums-out sentiment in the country after campaign financing scandals involving President Enrique Bolaños helped carry him to what appears to be a victory.
He was also aided significantly by a change in election rules that allows a candidate to win in the first round with only 35 percent of the vote, so long as he is 5 points above his closest opponent. If Mr. Ortega had not won on the first round, most political strategists predicted he would not have survived a second round, as the splintered anti-Sandinista vote would have united.
As it was, the anti-Sandinista vote seemed split mostly between Mr. Montealegre, with 30.9 percent, and José Rizo, the candidate of the conservative ruling party, who had 22.9 percent, according to the Supreme Electoral Council, the Nicaraguan election authority. Two other candidates, Edmundo Jarquín, a dissident former Sandinista, and Edén Pastora, a former Sandinista who later became a contra rebel, trailed behind.
Results of a quick count carried out by a local monitoring group, Ethics and Transparency, tracked with the official results.
“It’s been a pretty exact count, we can say that Ortega’s triumph is almost sure,” said Carlos Tunnerman, a political analyst and former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington from 1984 to 1988.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who was in Nicaragua to monitor the election, said the quick count was “among the most definitive I have ever seen.” The count is based on a large, and strategically varied, sample of votes from urban and rural areas and different social strata, explained Mr. Carter and local analysts.
On Sunday night, following the first presentation of results by the election authorities, Mr. Montealegre denounced the early closing of some polling places and problems with the delivery of voter identification cards. He said he would not concede defeat until all votes were counted.
Mr. Carter agreed that there were minor problems with the voting process, but said he did not think they were significant enough to affect the results.
“The likelihood is that those few anomalies, which exist in every election in the world, will not be substantive enough collectively to change the apparent results of this election,” Mr. Carter said.
Electoral observers have said the vote was mostly peaceful and orderly, despite long lines and some angry confrontations among voters who claimed polling stations closed before they could vote.
Observers from the Organization of American States said 2 percent of potential voters were not able to cast ballots, and they estimated turnout around 70 percent, The A.P. reported.
Because the front-runner was a cold-war icon for the left, the race generated interest in the United States. Even Oliver North, a former White House aide to President Reagan, visited to speak against Mr. Ortega. Mr. North was at the heart of what became known as the Iran-contra affair.
But in recent years, American money has flowed into Nicaragua in the form of investments. The country has cheap labor and low crime rates, and recently joined the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
During his campaign, Mr. Ortega emphasized his goal of peace and reconciliation, choosing bright pink as the color for his campaign and adopting the rhythm of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” for his jingle.
For some, Mr. Ortega and the Sandinistas still conjure up memories of the war and tough economic times. Marlon José Sánchez Padilla, 36, who sold oranges on Sunday outside of a polling station in the town of Nindirí, bitterly recalled his two years of military service in the 1980s. “Many people were mutilated,” he said. “Now he promises the sky, earth and highways, but we don’t believe him anymore.”
Others at the polls on Sunday said it was time to give Mr. Ortega another chance. “It seems that Daniel Ortega has asked for pardon,” said Ninosca Leets, 46, a housewife who said she fled to the United States during the former Sandinista government. “He’s asked for reconciliation. He’s asked for a change, and I think he should be given the opportunity.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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