Daniel Ortega said on Sunday in Managua that Nicaragua will not hold elections again, a sweeping declaration that leaves the country’s next vote in limbo after a constitutional reform had already pushed it to November 2027. Speaking at an act for the 47° aniversario de la revolución sandinista, Ortega told opponents in exile to forget about trying to reach power through elections.
The timing mattered. Ortega, 80, had not appeared in public for two months before arriving at the event driving a car, and his words were delivered in front of a political movement that has spent decades tightening its grip on Nicaragua. He has ruled before, in the 1980s, and returned to power in 2007, but this statement went further than any routine show of control. It did not just defend the current order. It appeared to close off the ballot box itself.
That is a sharp break from the calendar Nicaragua was supposed to follow. Before a constitutional reform, general elections were due in November 2026 after the presidential term was changed from five years to six years; under that new timetable, the vote would have come in November 2027. Instead, Ortega said there would be no more elections and that laws would be approved to stop the opposition. He said the Asamblea Nacional and other corresponding organizations would work on measures to put “a wall” and “a block” on what he called coup plotters.
The friction is hard to miss. In February 2025, a constitutional reform annulled the independence of powers in Nicaragua and handed total power to Ortega and Rosario Murillo, whose rank was raised from vice president to co-president. That came after the repression of the 2018 protests, which left more than 300 dead according to the ONU, and after years in which opponents were jailed, forced into exile, stripped of nationality and property, or pushed out of public life altogether. Thousands of Nicaraguans now live as refugees in Costa Rica, España and the Estados Unidos.
Ortega’s comments make clear that the electoral route to power is no longer being treated as a legitimate option for the opposition, but as something the government intends to shut down by law. The unanswered question is not whether he wants that outcome; it is how far the new legal changes will go, and whether Nicaragua’s election calendar survives at all.
