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Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, has said the Central American nation will stop holding elections, slipping further away from democracy after years of crackdowns on dissent and political opposition decried by human rights groups.
Ortega, who has spent two decades in power after serving an earlier presidential term during the 1980s, said on Sunday that U.S.-backed parties and supporters of the Somoza family—who ruled Nicaragua until 1979—would “never again” return to power.
While Ortega helped overthrow the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in the 1979 Sandinista revolution, he and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have overseen a shuffle toward authoritarian rule in recent years.
The U.S. State Department branded Ortega and Murillo “dictators” and sanctioned several of the regime’s top officials.
The United Nations’ Human Rights Council describes Ortega and Murillo’s Nicaragua as an “authoritarian state” that casts away human rights. Ortega and Murillo pulled Managua from this council in February 2025.
Human rights groups accused Ortega and Murillo of human rights abuses after the government violently put down nationwide protests against the country’s leadership in 2018. At least 355 people, mostly demonstrators, were killed between April and July that year, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Ahead of the 2021 elections, Ortega’s government detained their critics, presidential candidates and opposition figures, changing the law so that prosecutors could hold people for up to 90 days without charging them.
Here’s how Ortega’s regime in Nicaragua compares to dictatorships around the world.
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro, who led Venezuela from 2013 until he was removed from power by U.S. forces in January this year, was closely allied with Ortega and accused of authoritarianism by several U.S. administrations.
Like Nicaragua under Ortega, Maduro’s Venezuela held elections, but they were not internationally recognized as free and fair, with challengers for power targeted by the government.
Maduro used the country’s security services, police and pro-regime groups to crush anti-government protests. At least 25 people were killed shortly after disputed elections handed Maduro another term in 2024, according to Human Rights Watch.
U.N. investigators said in 2021 that Maduro’s government had “deeply eroded” the country’s legal system and accused the Venezuelan judiciary of helping to repress the population.
Nicaragua doesn’t have an independent justice system, according to the U.S.-based Freedom House non-profit. Nicaragua’s political leaders “strongly” influence who is picked to be a judge, and the judiciary “played a critical role in ordering the arrest of opposition members and ending the legal status of opposition parties” just before the 2021 elections, according to the organization.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) described Venezuela and Nicaragua as two of “the most clearly authoritarian states in Latin America and the region’s most flagrant FORB [freedom of religion or belief] violators” in November 2025.
The Nicaraguan government launched an “intense crackdown against the Catholic Church,” the commission had said the previous year. Ortega and Murillo have expelled Catholic priests from the country, detained religious leaders and raided or seized properties linked to the church.
The USCIRF said the Catholic Church had become targeted in both Nicaragua and Venezuela because of its “significant influence in popular and civil society.” Both countries are predominantly Catholic.
Vladimir Putin, Russia
There are many differences between Russia under Vladimir Putin and Ortega and Murillo’s Nicaragua, including their size, population, and aims on the world stage.
But they pull some of their governing tactics from the same playbook.
Putin is well-known for targeting his political opponents—most famously, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was imprisoned in 2021 and later died in detention in 2024. Separately, Putin’s former ally and the leader of the now-disbanded Wagner Group of mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane crash north of Moscow in August 2023 after leading an anti-Kremlin mutiny.
In October 2025, at least 77 people were detained in Nicaragua as political prisoners, according to human rights groups.
Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus
Belarus’s longtime leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is often spoken of in similar terms.
He’s frequently described as Putin’s strongest ally, and the Kremlin said it was willing to send troops into Belarus to quell anti-government protests that broke out in 2020, shortly after controversial elections in the country. The U.S. and European Union rejected the results of the vote as invalid.
Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, and is sometimes dubbed Europe’s “last dictator.” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus’s main opposition figure, launched her bid for the presidency after her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested while campaigning in 2020.
Tsikhanouskaya later set up an opposition office in exile in Lithuania.
“Lukashenko has imprisoned or exiled opposition leaders before elections, and in Russia, where prominent opposition figures have been barred, imprisoned or otherwise prevented from mounting an effective electoral challenge,” said Nic Cheeseman, a professor specializing in democracy at the University of Birmingham, U.K.
Xi Jinping, China
Ortega has heavily restricted non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and religious institutions operating in Nicaragua, marking “one of the most extensive crackdowns on civil society in Latin America,” Cheeseman told Newsweek.
In just one day in August 2024, Ortega’s regime canceled the legal status of around 1,500 non-profits, including multiple NGOs, according to Freedom House.
Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has also tightened his control of NGOs and other organizations in China. Xi also scrapped limits on presidential terms in 2018, paving the way for him to stay in post beyond 2023. Chinese leaders could previously only serve two consecutive five-year terms under the country’s constitution.
Ortega has “progressively dismantled constitutional constraints on his rule, including removing presidential term limits and concentrating power in the presidency,” Cheeseman said.
Meanwhile, Nicaragua’s government approved an amendment to the country’s constitution, banning restrictions on presidential terms, back in 2014.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Cristina Diciu.
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