First Trip to the Polls

By George Russell

The Sandinistas win, as expected, and the U.S. remains critical

Before the election the atmosphere was charged with loud and often violent disagreement. The pressure to participate was high: many citizens feared that they would lose precious food-rationing cards if they failed to register to vote. Yet after the tension of the preliminaries, election day in Nicaragua last Sunday came as something of an anticlimax. There was little of the exuberance, or the fear, that had been variously predicted for the country's first trip to the polls since the 1979 revolution that overthrew Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Indeed, the Nicaraguan election mood was one of indifference, as citizens lined up to make their choices, then ink their thumbs as a guarantee against double voting. Random visits to polling sites seemed to show that participation by the country's 1.6 million voters was less than the roughly 82% turnout that the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front claimed as evidence of the election's success.

The outcome was never in doubt. With roughly half of the presidential and legislative ballots counted, about 63% had gone to the Sandinistas and the front's presidential candidate, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, 38. The early results also appeared to guarantee a substantial smattering of representation in a new 90-seat National Assembly for the six other parties on the ballot. The veneer of pluralism, however, will be thin. Four of the parties in the race, including the Sandinistas, were Marxist-Leninist in orientation. Of the three non-Communist parties, one, the Independent Liberals, remained on the ballot even though the party leadership had tried to withdraw from the race, charging that the contest was unfair.

In Washington, the State Department, which maintains that it did not try to influence the outcome of the election, adopted a harshly critical tone in assessing the result. "It wasn't a very good election," said Department Spokesman John Hughes. "It was just a piece of theater for the Sandinistas." On Tuesday evening, U.S. intelligence sources told TIME that a Soviet ship due to tie up in a Nicaraguan port was carrying twelve shipping crates of the type used to transport high-performance MiG-21 jet fighters. The Soviets, they reported, last week had already delivered more than half a dozen Hind assault helicopters with night-flying capability and firepower equal to that of the most powerful American gunships. If so, it would mark the first time the Soviets have shipped weapons directly to Nicaragua instead of using Bulgarian and Cuban intermediaries. Such a move would be a direct challenge to clear U.S. warnings that the delivery of sophisticated aircraft would constitute an unacceptable destabilization of the regional balance of power.

The U.S. had pushed hard for elections in which all parties felt free to participate. But counting the Independent Liberals, five parties refused to take part on the grounds that the procedures under which the elections were held were unfair. Serving as an umbrella organization for the other nonparticipants was Nicaragua's most prominent opposition group, the Coordinadora, an amalgam of four opposition political parties, labor unions and businessmen led by Arturo Cruz Porras, a former Sandinista junta member. As a result, in Washington's view, no one except the Sandinistas had any chance to win.

Although the election was meant, in the words of a Sandinista comandante, to define the country's "political order," power will remain in the hands of the nine-member National Directorate. A more important purpose of the balloting was to convince the world that the Sandinistas intend to abide by their longstanding promises of democracy and political pluralism. Some 450 foreign observers watched the Nicaraguan balloting, but there were no official delegations from the major Western industrial democracies. The absence of observers from the hostile Reagan Administration was no surprise. But Canada also declined to send a delegation, as did every member of the European Community, with the exception of The Netherlands.

The indifferent voter response was a surprise, since the government had made it clear that it considered failure to vote a counterrevolutionary stance. In the days prior to the election, members of Nicaragua's neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committees carried that message door to door. Presidential Candidate Ortega stressed the same theme at a mammoth windup campaign rally in Managua, the capital, three days before the balloting. As some 300,000 people filled the huge, newly constructed Plaza of the Heroes and Martyrs on the shore of Lake Managua, Ortega declared, "All Nicaraguans who are Nicaraguans are going to vote.

The only ones who are not going to vote are sellouts."

The Sandinistas are pinning " many of their hopes of bringing political calm to Nicaragua on private talks called a "national dialogue." The first round, held the week before the election, brought together about 30 Nicaraguan political parties, social and labor organizations, from conservative to extreme left. But those attending the talks have only a consulting role. National Directorate Member Carlos Nunez Tellez declares that giving authority to the group would constitute "putting a brake on the powers of the state." --By George Russell. Reported by June Erlick and Janice C. Simpson/Managua

With reporting by June Erlick, JANICE C. SIMPSON