President Daniel Ortega has dispensed with what remained of Nicaragua’s democratic pretence. On 19 July, the 80-year-old dictator declared that Nicaragua would hold ‘no more elections’ so the opposition could never try to ‘seize power’ again. Ortega, in power since 2007, cast the opposition as a proxy for the USA bent on taking control. This is the standard justification made by a regime that treats any independent political activity as foreign subversion.

The next election was originally scheduled for November 2026. A constitutional overhaul approved in late 2024 and ratified in January 2025 postponed it until 2027. It also extended the presidential term, elevated Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, from vice-president to ‘co-president’ and handed the couple control over every branch of the state. With Ortega and Murillo’s son, Laureano Ortega Murillo, positioned as monarchical heir apparent, the abolition of elections that had already been emptied of meaning removes the last formal mechanism through which power in Nicaragua could change hands.

Civil society dismantled

The elimination of elections is the political capstone of a longer-term project to destroy every organised space beyond the ruling family’s control. Since 2018, the government has closed over 5,500 civil society organisations, almost 80 per cent of what existed. The closures have swept up cultural and leisure associations, trade unions, women’s groups, at least 27 private universities, independent media and religious bodies, with the Catholic Church, long one of the few institutions able to retain a degree of independence, a particular target.

In early July, some 2,000 lawyers found their licences to practise revoked overnight without notice, explanation or opportunity for appeal. Those affected include exiled former officials and ex-members of the ruling Sandinista party, along with lawyers with no political affiliation, effectively leaving many Nicaraguans without access to legal defence. The Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, an independent body mandated by the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, condemned the purge as an escalation aimed at removing any potential checks on state power.

In a February 2025 report, the Group concluded that the government has weaponised every arm of the state and its abuses amount to crimes against humanity committed as deliberate state policy, directed through chains of command between the presidency and local officials. In April 2025 it named 54 officials, in addition to Ortega and Murillo, as responsible, and has repeatedly called for them to face judicial investigation.

Repression beyond borders

Inside Nicaragua, organised opposition has effectively ceased to exist. Parties that once contested elections have seen their leaders imprisoned, exiled or stripped of citizenship. None maintains a functioning presence in Nicaragua. There are no independent media left, and barely any civil society organisations. Persecution has forced over 935,000 people, around one in eight Nicaraguans, into exile since mass protests in 2018, which security forces suppressed by killing more than 300 people.

This means activism has shifted almost entirely to the diaspora, which continues to document abuses, sustain independent reporting and press Nicaragua’s case before international bodies. In March, one of the five platforms of the civic and political opposition in exile put forward a 16-point roadmap for democratic transition, starting with the release of political prisoners and a halt to repression, and calling for unity among democratic forces inside and outside Nicaragua.

But exile offers no guarantee of safety. A September 2025 Group of Human Rights Experts report shows the regime runs an extensive transnational surveillance and intelligence network that uses the army, police, foreign service and informal agents to track critics abroad. Exiled activists, journalists, opposition politicians and former security personnel have been followed, photographed and threatened and had their digital activity monitored and communications intercepted.

For a growing number of exiles, surveillance ends in violence. In June 2025, Roberto Samcam, a retired army major who became one of the regime’s most prominent critics, was shot dead at his home in San José, Costa Rica, by an assassin posing as a delivery driver. He’d warned Costa Rican police and fellow exiles he was being followed.

Samcam was among at least four exiled opposition figures killed in Central America since 2022. Many more have survived attempts, among them activist Joao Maldonado, who was seriously wounded in two shootings in San José, first in September 2021 and then in January 2024. Others have reported being fired on by men on motorcycles or beaten, and some have left Costa Rica for Europe.

Transnational repression has been reinforced by the mass stripping of nationality. The government has revoked the citizenship of hundreds of critics, including 222 political prisoners it expelled to the USA in 2023 and 135 it shipped to Guatemala in 2024. The authorities declared them stateless on arrival and confiscated their assets back home. At the same time, the government changed the Penal Code to allow the prosecution of Nicaraguan exiles and foreigners for ‘crimes against the state’, with penalties ranging from fines and the confiscation of assets to up to 30 years in prison.

When the regime can’t reach exiles, it seeks to silence them by attacking their families. Relatives who remain in Nicaragua are arbitrarily detained, dismissed from their jobs, harassed and stripped of property.

International withdrawal

International bodies offer a route to accountability, and the regime is moving to close it off. Having quit the Organization of American States in 2023, in 2025 Nicaragua announced its withdrawal from five more multilateral bodies: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, the International Labour Organization, the International Organization for Migration and, most recently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The break with UNESCO followed the agency’s decision to award its 2025 World Press Freedom Prize to La Prensa, Nicaragua’s oldest and most prestigious newspaper, now produced by Nicaraguan journalists in exile.

Still, some mechanisms to hold Nicaragua to account remain and don’t need its consent. Two months after Nicaragua announced it was quitting the Human Rights Council in February 2025, the Council renewed the Group of Experts’ mandate for a further two years and extended its reporting to the UN General Assembly.

The Group of Experts has repeatedly urged states to protect exiles, strengthen asylum for Nicaraguans stripped of their nationality and pursue accountability through the International Court of Justice or by applying the principle of universal jurisdiction. An Argentine judge, acting under universal jurisdiction, has issued arrest warrants for Ortega, Murillo and other senior officials, and the Inter-American human rights system continues to take up cases brought by the diaspora. The legal instruments exist, but the will to use them is often missing.

The USA doesn’t recognise Ortega’s government as legitimate, yet in September 2025 the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Nicaraguans, with the Department of Homeland Security asserting that conditions were now safe for return, a claim at odds with UN findings. A federal court annulled the termination, but an appeals court reinstated it in February 2026, leaving thousands of Nicaraguans exposed to deportation.

Ortega has compensated for lack of support from democracies by turning to the world’s autocracies. China, which Nicaragua recognised in place of Taiwan in 2021, has now become the regime’s main source of funding. Russia provides intelligence and security advice and training, and in 2022 was authorised to station troops and warships on Nicaraguan territory.

Its older ideological allies, however, offer far less than they once did. Venezuela’s government was upended when US forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in January. Cuba is immersed in its deepest crisis in decades, and Iran is reeling from its war with Israel and the USA. This has forced Ortega to lean harder on China and Russia.

Long-term pressure

The regime’s grip depends increasingly on coercion. Over two decades, Ortega has bound the army to himself. Its loyal chief, General Julio César Avilés, started a fourth consecutive six-year term in 2025, and a constitutional change announced in July will extend his term and that of the police director to seven years. Through the military pension institute, the high command runs a business empire that rewards loyalty. Genuine support has narrowed to the Sandinista Front’s party structures, public employees and the beneficiaries of social programmes, and observers report increasing discontent among the Sandinista base and competition potentially coming from within the party.

Ortega’s abolition of elections strips away the pretence that Nicaragua’s rulers derive their authority from anything other than force. In practice it changes little, since no free vote had been possible for years. But it’s also revealing. As Dora María Téllez, a former Sandinista commander who’s become one of the leading exiled opposition voices, explains, a government that controls the army, the courts, the electoral machinery and the police but now won’t risk even a stage-managed vote is one that has lost confidence in its people. Ortega will have watched Venezuela closely. In 2024 Nicolás Maduro held an election he believed he’d won in advance, having stopped the main opposition leader standing, only to see a little-known substitute become the catalyst for all the pent-up discontent.

Scrapping elections spares Ortega that danger in the short term. Over the long term, pressure for the restoration of democracy will depend on the endurance of Nicaraguan civil society, at home and in exile, and on democratic states willing to hold the regime to account.

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