The significance of the Nicaraguan election is this: For the first time in that country's history, one freely elected government has given way to another freely elected government.
It also marks the second time Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega has been repudiated at the polls. But the communist Sandinistas retain a following, and for the same reasons: Too much of that impoverished land's wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few people.The winner (pending a recount) is Arnoldo Aleman, usually described as a "conservative businessman." The more accurate term, according to one longtime observer of Nicaragua, is an "old pol." Aleman has been mayor of the capital, Managua, for the past five years, earning a reputation as a deft hand with pavement and patronage.
He will need those political skills to carry out his campaign pledge of undoing the grosser excesses of the Sandinista revolution and attracting foreign aid and investment. As long as the Sandinistas have any chance of returning to power, outside investment is likely to be a trickle.
The Sandinistas ousted the corrupt, U.S.-backed Somoza regime in 1979 and, in a generally popular gesture, distributed that oligarchy's holdings to the poor and dispossessed. Reversing that redistribution would probably be unwise.
However, the Sandinista leadership, becoming increasingly corrupt, grabbed choice businesses, farms and houses for itself, and elementary fairness requires the reversal of that particular plundering.
The United States has a disconcerting habit of losing interest in countries, and it's hard now to remember that U.S. foreign policy was preoccupied with Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Many of Nicaragua's problems are of our making, whether wrongly, as in backing the Somoza regime, or rightly, as in backing the Contra rebellion that forced the Sandinistas to the polls.
Aleman deserves U.S. support and encouragement so that he, too, will be able to transfer power to a freely elected government.