It never fails to end this way.
Masquerading as left-wing populist socialists, they deny they are communists as they demand economic equality.
Adored and abetted by a fawning media, their avowed anti-Americanism ensures their status as the left’s latest cause célèbre.
As is said about a bankruptcy: it happened slowly, then suddenly.
Having acquired a measure of power, incrementally they accumulate more by ever-escalating and amoral tactics, all rationalized as benefiting the “people” by hastening them into the warm embrace of the collective that is the aim of the revolution. Ever so slowly, democracy and civil liberties erode . . .
The mask is ripped off.
The communist totalitarian state reigns.
It is a case of “meet the new boss, worse than the old boss,” one wherein the irony resides in the fact that the “populist socialists” wind up becoming the very regime they opposed—but with one important difference: the new leftist regime is even more repressive and corrupt than the one they deposed.
The latest case in point: The revanchist Sandinista state of co-presidents and spouses Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo who rule over Nicaragua—in perpetuity, if they have their way.
People of a certain age well remember the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras to rid Nicaragua of the communist Sandinista regime. Led by Daniel Ortega, in 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the oligarchical dictator Anastasio Somoza, who had turned that impoverished nation into his family’s personal piggy bank for more than four decades.
While there was little sympathy for the departed Somoza clan, it didn’t take long for the “populist socialist reformers,” the Sandinistas, to reveal themselves. Consolidating their stranglehold on Nicaragua, the FSLN’s radical agenda included land confiscation and redistribution, the curtailing of democracy, civil liberties, and human rights, and alliances with communist Cuba and the Soviet Union. By 1990, in an internationally observed and closely monitored election, the Nicaraguan people threw out the Sandinistas and elected the real populist reformer, Violeta Chamorro.
In the following elections of 1996, 2001, and 2006, power was transferred peacefully between the presidential contestants. The 2006 recipient of the peaceful transfer of presidential power? Daniel Ortega. (There were a host of reasons for his return, including unforced errors by the democratic leaders of Nicaragua, the United States, and the “pink tide” sweeping Latin America at the time.)
It has proven to be the last “free and fair election” in Nicaragua. Not only that. Ortega and Murillo want it to be the last election period.
As reported by Christian K. Caruzo in Breitbart, in a classic case of projection, the octogenarian Ortega claimed he had to cancel elections to prevent American imperialists from interfering in them and bringing to power the exploiting enemies of the Nicaraguan people.
“There will be no more elections here. There will be no more elections so that they [Nicaraguan opposition] can’t try to seize the government or seize power,” he said.
“We’re going to work with the National Assembly and the relevant organizations to pass laws — because we need to pass laws that will tie the hands of the coup plotters and the traitors, and ensure that no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t be able to succeed.”
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The fact that neither Ortega nor Murillo presently has the power to abolish elections, even for the people’s own good, is apparently not an issue. As Zeale News reports:
“Nicaragua’s Constitution still requires general elections every six years, but Ortega said his government would work with the Sandinista-controlled National Assembly to enact laws placing a ‘wall’ between opposition parties and political power.
“The declaration follows sweeping constitutional changes approved in 2025 that elevated Murillo from vice president to co-president, extended presidential terms from five to six years, and placed Nicaragua’s legislative, judicial, and electoral institutions under the presidency’s authority.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS) Albert Ramdin, and others denounced Ortega and Murillo’s termination of elections and defended the civil and human rights of the Nicaraguan people. Rubio further called for the Nicaraguan dictatorship to be isolated as an international pariah.
But such denunciations and diplomatic strategies have not proven particularly efficacious in moving the regime. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have imposed sanctions upon the dictatorship, including the June 2026 imposition of visa restrictions on over 100 regime members, their relatives, and cronies.
Nonetheless, the Ortega-Murillo regime has continued brutalizing its people; shuttering pro-democracy organizations; jailing and/or stripping dissidents of citizenship; persecuting the Catholic Church; and helping their family and friends to raid the public treasury and more—among its lethal litany of communist oppression. What’s another round of sanctions to the repressive and prehensile Sandinista dictatorship?
So too, the chances of the communist regime are not likely to pan out. The Ortega-Murillo workers’ paradise is a staunch ally of communist Cuba, communist China, authoritarian Russia, and terrorist-exporting Iran, among other international reprobates. These turds of a feather stick together, united in their hatred of freedom, democracy, and America.
Yet, the overarching consideration for the Nicaraguan regime is survival. After all they have done to the long-suffering Nicaraguan people, the only thing they have done for them is to deliver a nominal GDP per capita of approximately $3,559—the second lowest per capita income in Latin America and the Caribbean. Consequently, their malevolent rule has created more public discontent than can likely be contained by their usual underhanded electoral tactics. This is even after their 2021 attacks on the electoral process, wherein the regime arrested dissidents, including potential presidential rivals.
So, for the Ortega and Murillo kleptocratic communist regime, their clan, and their comrades, ending elections is an ideological and practical necessity. After all, why hold an election you can’t win?
Tragically, in Nicaragua it is a rhetorical question. Which raises another question closer to home:
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How soon until the Democratic Socialists of America make it moot here?
