President of Nicaragua

Daniel Ortega, Co-President of Nicaragua

José Daniel Ortega Saavedra has led Nicaragua since 2007, when he returned to the presidency seventeen years after his 1979–1990 Sandinista revolutionary government. Since a February 2025 constitutional reform created a formal “Co-Presidency,” he has shared the office with his wife Rosario Murillo — an arrangement without precedent anywhere in the Americas. Across their cumulative four consecutive terms, the Ortega-Murillo couple have dismantled Nicaragua’s post-1990 democratic institutions, outlawed every meaningful opposition party, jailed or exiled all serious presidential challengers, stripped the citizenship of more than 300 critics (among them novelists Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli), and driven an estimated 800,000 Nicaraguans — roughly 12% of the population — into exile since the 2018 protests.

Ortega was born on 11 November 1945 in La Libertad, Chontales, the son of a middle-class family in small-town Chontales. He joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) as a teenager, spent seven years in Anastasio Somoza’s prisons from 1967 to 1974, and emerged as a member of the nine-man FSLN National Directorate that toppled the Somoza dynasty on 19 July 1979. He served as coordinator of the Junta of National Reconstruction until 1985, then as President of Nicaragua from 10 January 1985 to 25 April 1990, when he lost re-election to Violeta Chamorro. He contested and lost three further presidential elections (1996, 2001) before winning again in 2006 with just 38% of the vote under new rules his FSLN had negotiated.

From Elected President to Dynastic Regime

Since 2007 Ortega has systematically dismantled term limits and independent institutions. A 2014 constitutional reform abolished presidential term limits. He was re-elected in 2011, 2016 and — most controversially — 2021, after every credible opposition candidate was arrested between May and July of that year on charges of “treason” or “undermining national integrity,” leaving seven regime-approved fringe parties on the ballot. Rosario Murillo, in charge of the government’s communications strategy since 2007, was formally named Vice President in 2017. The April 2018 anti-pension-reform protests were met with live fire — the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented at least 355 deaths over four months — and the government outlawed public assembly, seized the offices of virtually every independent media outlet, and expelled the IACHR from the country.

The 2024–2025 Constitutional Overhaul

In November 2024 Ortega submitted a sweeping rewrite of the 1987 constitution. The Managua National Assembly approved it in two rounds, and it took effect on 18 February 2025. The document declares Nicaragua “a revolutionary state” led by the FSLN, extends presidential terms from five to six years, establishes an explicit “Co-Presidency” vested in Ortega and Murillo, subordinates the judiciary, electoral council and military to the executive, and requires all media to operate “in harmony with national interests.” The text institutes lifelong guaranteed personal immunity for Ortega, Murillo and their family. Seven of the couple’s children hold senior posts in communications, foreign policy, and state enterprises; their eldest son Laureano, the presidential economic adviser, is widely regarded as heir apparent.

Foreign Policy and Isolation

Nicaragua has deepened ties with Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela and Cuba. Since 2023 Managua has recognised Russia’s annexation of eastern Ukraine and officially sided with Moscow at the UN. The regime broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican in March 2023 after the exile of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, closed more than 5,500 NGOs including Catholic orders and universities, and in early 2024 stripped the citizenship of 222 political prisoners and deported them to the United States. Washington, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada maintain individual sanctions on Ortega, Murillo, their children, and some 100 other officials. Nicaragua remains a member of the OAS only nominally; it announced its withdrawal in November 2021.