The president of the extinct Citizens for Freedom (CxL) party, Kitty Montereydenounced that the municipal electoral process, planned for this coming November, lacks credibility “due to the political exclusion of the opposition and the absolute lack of freedoms within” Nicaragua.
In addition, he pointed out that the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) at the service of the Daniel Ortega regime has reduced election day to “its minimum expression, both in duration and in public relevance.”
In a publicationthe leader of CxL assured that the first element that shows “the lack of transparency, fairness and legal certainty” of the next municipal elections, is the 2022 municipal electoral calendar, which is full of “deficiencies.”
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Monterrey pointed out that the electoral calendar “is fundamental in Nicaragua to determine the quality of the electoral processes, because the Electoral Law omits to mention or set deadlines for the activities that constitute the electoral process, leaving its regulation to the CSE, which in each electoral process establishes some in the Electoral Calendar and omits others or executes them in a discretionary way».
Likewise, he stressed that the calendar for the next municipal elections “incorporates the reductions in the duration of the electoral process approved through the reform of May 5, 2022 to the Electoral Law. For the rest, it has the same structure, characteristics and deficiencies of those that governed previous electoral processes.
«The CSE continues to exercise its powers in a discretionary manner in the main activities of the process, since each activity or normative document that is omitted to be mentioned in the Electoral Calendar means that the CSE can carry out the activity discretionally in terms of time and form, which It undermines legal certainty and electoral transparency,” he stressed.
Kitty Monterrey also denounced that, as in previous processes, the 2022 electoral calendar “does not establish a date for the issuance of any regulation, with the exception of the Electoral Ethics Regulation, for which the other regulations will continue to be published when the CSE sees fit. during the process and not together with the call for elections as it should be».
Therefore, these deficiencies that exist in the electoral calendar “have persisted during several electoral processes,” which “undermine legal certainty and hinder the training of prosecutors,” he added.
In addition, he highlighted that the Electoral Law establishes that the electoral calendar must be consulted with the participating political parties and «this consultation -which in the 2022 electoral process was reduced to one day- is formally carried out in each election and in the last fifteen years no suggestion of the political parties has been accepted’.
According to Monterrey, with the reform to the Electoral Law of last May, the CSE modified the terms of the process and omitted constitutive activities within the electoral calendar for the next municipal elections.
“As a result of these modifications, the 2022 municipal electoral process, from the call to the voting, was reduced from 6 months (180 calendar days) to 2 months and 3 weeks (82 calendar days), which go from August 16 to August 6. November,” he said.
In such a way that the CSE has issued, as in previous electoral processes, “an incomplete electoral calendar, with the aggravating circumstance that by virtue of the last electoral reform the terms for appointing electoral structures and electoral campaign are drastically reduced”, assured.
“If these were real elections, the Electoral Calendar would not guarantee the transparency of the process or the rights of the opposition parties,” Monterrey concluded.
