Nicaragua Backtracks Centuries with New Constitution
Returning to absolutism in the twenty-first century
Absolutism takes us back to the Dark Ages, when people had no rights and were servants owned by despotic monarchs.
By Silvio Prado (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – On January 13, when Nicaragua’s National Assembly endorses the Constitutional reforms in a required second session, they will have committed Hari Kari as an independent branch of the Republic that was founded two centuries ago. Instead, they’ll be giving way to absolutism, a political formula that died in Paris in 1789.
Nicaragua, which has experienced almost everything conceivable in its politics, will have the dubious honor of regressing all the way back to those times. If we accept that as of 2025, the population will be living under absolutist rule, it’s helpful to clarify what the term means. Absolutism is a form of exercising power that was common in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and whose principal characteristic consisted in a monarchy that was accountable to no one, except a Christian God.
The classical authors take great care to differentiate among three groups of anti-democratic domination. The first, tyranny, despotism, and dictatorship, all correspond to antiquity – concretely the Greeks and Romans – and lasted until feudalism. The second group, absolutism and autocracy, correspond to the period that concluded with the French Revolution in 1789. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are recent categories, used to typify the fascist and Stalinist regimes.
As if shuffling the cards, after 1945 political practice has mixed all of these prototypes, indistinctly encompassing all regimes that oppose the paradigm of democracy under the recent letterhead of illiberal. But, given the times, it’s a good idea to put an adequate name on the ill we suffer, in order to be able to confront it.
Without looking far, we can examine the case of totalitarianism, the word most employed since the proposed bill for Constitutional Reforms became known at the end of 2024. According to the classics, totalitarianism presents at least the following characteristics: the concentration of all State power; control over the government armed forces; control over all the media; use of the police as an instrument of State terrorism; and an economy subjugated to centralized planning.
Absolutism, as Sartori points out, is characterized by an “unlimited exercise of power, discretionary and, for that reason, excessive and harmful.” This arises from its two fundamental traits: it has no counterbalances to restrain it, and it is above the laws, from which it is either detached or not obliged to comply. However, the seed of absolutism above all lies in its hereditary and hence dynastic character, in other words, family succession.
Absolutism belonged to a pre-political era, an early stage compared to totalitarianism, to the degree that its perceptions of the State and of society revolved around the preservation of the royal family’s power. The absolute monarch made the decisions in all spheres; there were no autonomous institutions; and society was divided into classes or levels – nobles (including the military), the clergy, and the common people. All privileges were reserved for the first two groups; the duties for the latter.
Applying this to the reforms due to be approved on January 13th, we find Article 8: “The people exercise government power through the Presidency of the Republic, which directs the government and coordinates the Legislative, Judicial and Electoral organs, the Public Administration and Treasury Controls, and the Autonomous entities.” This article contains the essence of absolutism, as previously defined: the President is the head of all and everyone; no one is above that figure, which means the office is not accountable to anyone, no one controls it. While the absolutist king declared that his power came from the ethereal figure of a god, the Ortega regime assures that it derives from a people – a people who in practice are denied their rights. The same rights which, in a display of cynicism, they claim in Article 24 to recognize.
If Article 8 is the corollary of absolutism, those that follow later lay out the new governmental organization, specifying exactly what the submission of each organism (I don’t dare call them institutions) to the Supreme Ruler will consist of. These Articles leave it clear that within the new State there’ll be nothing that resembles the system of checks and balances that characterizes the constitutional democracies and seeks to limit political power in order to guarantee popular sovereignty.
As has already been pointed out, [under the reformed Nicaraguan Constitution] the State powers disappear, all autonomous spaces disappear, and – importantly – political pluralism disappears. Previously one of the Constitutional principles enshrined in Article 5, political pluralism is now reduced to mentions of social and cultural pluralism. In line with the ideas formulated by Bodino, the theorist of absolutism, one of the conditions for this classification is that the power must be, above all, indivisible.
In the new scheme, the power isn’t concentrated in the State, as the fascists attempted, but in the Ortega-Murillo family, just like in the royal families of the ancient dynasties. If you look for an official ideology, despite the fact that the preamble attempts to outline an ideological theory, the level of verbosity is so convoluted and ludicrous that what shines through is the lack of an ideology behind the ill-conceived creature.
In terms of the party, the intention to proclaim a single party system is only hinted at. However, the purges practiced in 2024 make it evident that the FSLN has ceased to exist as a political organization dedicated to conquering and preserving power, becoming a body held together by corruption, the looting of public works, and the fear of repression from the governing family.
With respect to control over the military and political apparatus, both bodies act as repressive instruments, but their main contributions are in the role of royal guard, to sustain and protect the regime.
The case of the National Assembly merits a separate mention. The blind obedience shown the Ortega-Murillo family, as evidenced by the approval without debate of the Constitutional reforms, illustrates that they’ve transformed from a Parliament into a Royal Court, where they consummate the most delirious whims of the cogoverning matron, and the deputies are no more than courtesans, extras in Ortega’s vaudeville show.
Although in colloquial terms, the reforms that will be definitively passed on this second week of January are deemed the consolidation of totalitarianism, actually what will occur is something worse. It will be the involution into absolutism, the era of the caverns, when the people, the ordinary classes lacked all rights and were serfs who belonged to the despotic monarchs.
However, such a huge regression right in the twenty-first century, may perhaps hold the good news that the rock of Sisyphus has rolled down the hill as far as it can go. What follows will involve no alternative but the struggle and sacrifice of once again raising it to the crater’s edge. In Serrat’s words: “Blessed are those who are at the bottom of the well, because from there things can only get better.”
Read more from Nicaragua here on Havana Times.