-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Philip Chrimes, Nicaragua: navigating the politics of democracy. By David Close, International Affairs, Volume 92, Issue 6, November 2016, Pages 1560–1561, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12786
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Nicaragua: navigating the politics of democracy. By David Close. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2016. 215pp. Index. £62.50. ISBN 978 1 62637 435 5.
This is a book, as Canadian political scientist David Close succinctly puts it, about ‘Nicaragua's transition to, through, and from democracy’ (p. 155), in the period between the triumph of the Sandinista revolution over the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979 and 2015, when Daniel Ortega, one of the leaders of that revolution, was firmly entrenched in power. Close seeks to explain the reasons why the political elite has failed to find, during this period, a governing formula acceptable to most Nicaraguans, resulting in political polarization and the eventual return of one-man rule, conforming to certain historical features embedded in the country's political culture.
In contrast to most observers who see the 1990 elections—in which the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) unexpectedly lost power to a broad opposition coalition—as bifurcating the post-1979 period, marking the point of political transition to electoral democracy after a decade of revolutionary ferment, Close discerns no less than four political transitions: in 1979, 1984, 2000 and 2011. These transformations were not, in the last three cases, the result of changes of administration, as the sitting governments actually initiated them, but rather ‘full-scale makeovers of the political system: the entire logic, function, and purpose of the state’ (p. 4); they were sufficiently distinct to constitute different political regimes. The first two regimes, Close contends in a reprise of the argument set forth in his 1999 work, Nicaragua: the Chamorro years (Lynne Rienner; reviewed in International Affairs 75: 3), left Nicaragua more pluralistic and democratic, the last two moved the country away from democracy, so that by 2015 Nicaragua was neither a democracy nor an authoritarian state but a hybrid system, exhibiting a ‘balance of democratic and non-democratic traits’ (p. 157).
