The legislative instrument of Nicaragua’s dictatorship—which still bears the democratic-era name National Assembly, even though it no longer functions as an independent branch of government—is completing another round of sham consultations on the regime’s new totalitarian constitutional reform.
As is well known, the reform is scheduled for formal approval this September. Its purpose is to abolish free and competitive elections and eliminate the opposition’s right to seek political power through the ballot box.
For these supposedly consultative meetings, the regime’s legislative operators have assembled representatives from various sectors, including government loyalists and independents, diplomats and international organizations, business leaders, and bankers.
Also read: Chronicle of the Original Illegitimacy of the Ortega-Murillo Regime
Some of these staged consultations have amounted to little more than «yes, sir» performances. Others have been marked by cautious silence, as no one dares present independent proposals—let alone oppose a constitutional reform that has already been approved in advance by the very people who designed it: co-dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who impose their will without constraint.:
That is the dictatorship’s legislative process.
María Asunción García Martínez, who holds a doctorate in constitutional law from Complutense University of Madrid, defines the legislative process in her book The Legislative Procedure as «the set of formal steps and acts carried out by a parliament to create, amend, or repeal a law. This legislative cycle guarantees public debate and the legal validity of laws through clearly defined successive stages.»
She explains that the legislative process «is not merely a technical requirement or a formal legal procedure.» Its purpose is to ensure «the participation of citizens concerned with the specific actions of public authorities,» so that laws—including constitutional provisions—reflect not only the interests of the state and those in power, but above all the interests of the citizens who must obey them or benefit from them.
But Dr. García Martínez is describing a democratic legislative process.
There is another kind—one that is authoritarian, even totalitarian. Even the world’s worst dictatorships enact constitutions and ordinary laws to preserve their grip on power—that is, to retain authority that, by any standard of justice or law, does not belong to them but is instead maintained through force.
The legislative process under dictatorship—whether in Nicaragua, Cuba, China, or North Korea—is built on the concentration and centralization of power in the hands of a strongman, a ruling clique, a single party, or, as in Nicaragua today, a husband-and-wife ruling pair and their family circle.
Also of interest: How Daniel Ortega Ended Elections in Nicaragua: Five Key Moments That Led to Dictatorship
Under dictatorship, the legislative body merely pretends to make laws. In reality, it simply approves and confirms whatever orders arrive from above. Genuine opposition parties are outlawed. There is no meaningful legislative debate—only a monologue and repeated demonstrations of absolute obedience.
The so-called consultation on the new constitutional reform was therefore neither a technical debate nor a negotiation among competing interests, much less an exercise in popular sovereignty. It was simply an act of ratification and a display of manufactured public consensus around a decision that had already been made.
A law enacted in this manner—even if it is labeled constitutional—is not democratic and therefore deserves no voluntary obedience from citizens.
That is why, when democratic change eventually comes—as it inevitably will, sooner or later—this constitutional framework will have to be repealed by those who lead Nicaragua’s democratic transition.
