Voters to Choose: Crimson Or Red?

Like the last two U.S. presidential elections, the Nov. 5 Nicaraguan presidential election may feature a Harvard Business School graduate as one of its leading contenders.

Liberal Party candidate Eduardo R. Montealegre, a former banker who graduated from the Business School in 1980, ranked third with 17.3 percent of the vote in a University of Central America poll released yesterday. Left-wing Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega led the poll with 37.5 percent of the vote, and Jose Rizo of the ruling Liberal Party ranked second with 20.1 percent.

A September Zogby International poll ranked Montealegre in second place with 19 percent of the vote.

“He certainly has a chance,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a non-profit research organization specializing in U.S.-Latin America relations. “The whole question is forming enough coalitions with enough groups to ring up the votes.”

Birns said Montealegre is widely perceived as the U.S. government’s preferred candidate. Birns added that officials believe Ortega, the former Marxist who ruled the country in the 1980s, could ally with Venezulean President Hugo Chavez.

“Even though Ortega doesn’t have a Marxist bone left in his body, it is still enough to terrify the United States,” said Birns.

However, the U.S. will likely have little power over the upcoming elections.

“The U.S. has limited influence,” said Stephen Johnson, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “Anything the U.S. ambassador says in Nicaragua always gets big play, but again it is going to come down to whether Eduardo has a vision that speaks to the current needs of the Nicaraguan people.”

Current Nicaraguan law states that a candidate can win an election in one round if he garners 40 percent of the vote, or 35 percent if he has at least a 5 percent margin over his nearest competitor. If the most recent poll results hold true, Ortega has already achieved the margin that will allow him to win the election in one round.

However, Montealegre will have a legitimate chance to win the presidency if he makes it into the second round, said Johnson.

“He is popular enough. He is the one candidate who most liberal party and conservative voters would rally around,” he said. “He would certainly pull in independent voters including reformed Sandinistas.”