MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Second chance for reformed Ortega in Nicaragua

Sixteen years after he was ousted by voters weary of war, rationing and a devastated economy, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega looks set to have a new chance as president of Nicaragua.

Nicaraguans fed up with the inability of the last three conservative governments to improve life conditions for the majority of the population of one of Latinamerica's poorest countries have chosen a declared born again Social Democrat, former Marxist Ortega who has promised to respect the market economy and private property.

Electoral officials had yet to release final results from Sunday's presidential vote, but preliminary results with 62% of votes counted indicate Ortega has garnered almost 40% of the vote which is enough to ensure him a first-round victory and avoid a runoff. International observers, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, called the balloting free and fair.

"These results are final" said Roberto Courtney, who heads Ethics and Transparency stressing Mr Ortega's lead was "irreversible". The group deployed 11.000 electoral monitors during Sunday's voting.

His closest rival Harvard-educated banker Eduardo Montealegre trailed Ortega by at least seven percentage points. But Montealegre and two other candidates refused to recognize Ortega's victory, saying they would wait until all the votes had been counted. "This isn't over until the last vote has been counted," Montealegre said.

The United States, which has threatened to pull aid from an Ortega government, also said it was too soon to declare the Sandinista leader a winner.

A divided opposition and a new law lowering the vote share needed to win from 45% to 40% paved the way for Ortega's victory. An undeniably divisive figure, Ortega, 60, is despised and distrusted by many among the 60% who voted for his four opponents.

But this election became a referendum on the last 16 years of free-market policies. Privatizations and pro-investment policies in Nicaragua have yielded mediocre growth, heavy taxation of the poor and a drop in real salaries, according to official statistics.

One million Nicaraguan youngsters in a country of 5.6 million people are not enrolled in school, because they cannot afford fees, uniforms or materials or because they must work to support their families, according to Education Ministry figures.

The decline in health spending since 1990 has also been dramatic. The Sandinistas spent an average of 30 US dollars per person per year on health while holding power from 1979 to 1990, more than twice the 13 US dollars being spent by the current government, according to a World Bank-commissioned study.

The Sandinistas managed to eradicate diseases such as dengue fever and measles, but many have since returned, along with a surge in maladies associated with malnutrition, said Cirilo Otero Escorcia of the Center for Environmental Policy Initiatives, a think tank in Managua.

The Sandinista leader's victory in Sunday's election, when confirmed by final results, would expand the club of Latin American rulers with close links to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who has tried to help his Nicaraguan ally by shipping cheap oil to the energy-starved nation.

Ortega, who led Nicaragua from 1985-1990, repeatedly has said he no longer is the Marxist revolutionary who fought U.S.-backed Contra rebels in a war that left 30.000 dead and the economy in shambles. But while he has toned down his leftist rhetoric and pledged to continue free-trade policies, the United States remains openly wary of its former Cold War foe.