If Sandinistas Lose, Can the Winner Rule? : Nicaragua: Never in the nation’s history has a governing party turned over power in peace. Civil war resumes even as the election proceeds.

The big question--whether elections will proceed, can proceed, in the midst of civil war--may be the easiest one to answer in this nation of economic chaos and political contradictions. Everybody seems to expect that the voting for president, Assembly and municipal offices will occur on schedule, Feb. 25, 1990.

Whether those elections will be free and fair is a tougher question. Even now, with a U.N. observer team in place and an Organization of American States team prepared to conduct a parallel count of the ballots, many citizens are afraid that the combatants--with their weapons and their intimidating presence--cannot be kept out of the polling places.

Then comes the most perilous question of all. Assuming an election that produces a winner in a nation where no sitting government has ever turned over power peacefully, there is no assurance that either side will accept the result.

When President Daniel Ortega took his Sandinistas back to war against the Contra insurgency at the end of October, a world of speculation opened up outside Nicaragua. One school of political thought said the Sandinistas were using Contra incidents or Contra infiltrations from across the Honduran border as a pretext for calling off or postponing elections. One class within that school expected the Sandinistas to declare a new state of emergency that would disrupt or destroy the opposition campaign. Cynics suggested that the Sandinistas never intended to pursue the democratic process anyway. Why would a leftist regime, having won a military revolution, risk losing power at the polling place?

Inside Managua, such speculation looks wrong. Vice President Sergio Ramirez claims to welcome the elections, predicting a 60% majority for his Sandinistas. Deputy Foreign Minister Victor Hugo Tinoco, the man Ortega sent to lead a Sandinista delegation to the United Nations last week, insists that his party enjoys huge support no matter what the surveys by outside pollsters show. And Alfredo Cesar, a spokesman for the National Opposition Union (UNO), also expects that elections will take place.

The Sandinistas and the Violeta Chamorro-led UNO forces share some other areas of agreement: that the contest is now polarized between the two parties; that other opposition groups may not win a combined 2% of the electorate; that the countries of Central America can only advance through regional cooperation--and that right now, Nicaragua is in terrible economic shape.

This capital city is a concrete junkyard, unfinished buildings standing vacant since the 1972 earthquake, a testimony to the greed and despotism of former dictator Anastasio Somoza. The great quasi-colonial cathedral lost its roof then and today sits open to the sky, a garden of weeds growing up to the altar. The Inter-Continental Hotel has a swimming pool, boxing on cable TV from the United States and drinkable water--but no tourist trade.

Soon after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, Nicaragua was enjoying the highest growth rate in Latin America. Today, 40% of the gross national product has been wrecked by war. Consumption is down 70%. Because of hyper-inflation, real wages are about 7% of what they were less than a decade ago. People who manage two meals a day consider themselves fortunate.

“This is not Ethiopia,” insisted Father Xabier Gorostiaga, a Jesuit who runs a regional economic research organization. A Sandinista economist agreed: “You cannot improve housing and health care and education--you cannot implement huge projects--while prosecuting a war.”

The Sandinistas blame the United States--for national poverty, for preventing outside financial aid from reaching Nicaragua, for imposing a trade embargo and for funding the Contra military insurgency. The UNO opposition blames the Sandinistas for mismanagement, for destroying initiative in the process of removing--then restoring--elements of the private sector and for forcing some of the best minds to seek refugee status. Gorostiaga, with strong ties to the Sandinistas, conceded that “if political life were normalized, then economic life could be normalized.” Ideally sited Nicaragua could then get on with the dream of opening a “second Panama Canal” across the Central American isthmus.

A few signs of political normalizing enhance the chances for peaceful elections. More than 87% of the voting-age population--nearly 2 million people--has registered at 4,400 polling places throughout the country. The U.N. observation group, invited by the Sandinistas, will have 160 poll-watchers in place by election day, covering more than 60% of the voting locations. The OAS team, working with the U.N. group, reports that while there have been 350 complaints about voting procedures, neither side has yet committed any serious infractions.

The big campaign difference has been government access to television. Nicaragua has two channels, one strong, one weak. The Sandinistas have so far had better time on the better channel. But Igbal Riza of Pakistan, for the U.N. group, and Mario Gonzalez of Colombia, for the OAS team, claim to have government cooperation in efforts toward fairness and full participation. While dozens of nations are participating in the U.N. effort, no observers will come from either of the two superpowers or from the immediate region.

Assuming elections are held, what are the prospects for resolution after the event? A Managua executive who has been both in jail and back in business during the decade, said last week that the Sandinistas have the troops and the organization, meaning that Nicaragua’s survival depends upon a government of reconciliation: “If UNO wins, we have to have law and order, we have to have an army; if the Sandinistas win, we need UNO for economic reasons.”

Tinoco, a former seminarian and now one of the Sandinistas’ most persuasive voices, accused the United States of being the obstacle to Nicaragua resolution. Dark-eyed, dark-bearded, often smiling, with teeth white as Pepsodent, Tinoco sat for nearly four hours telling a small delegation of U.S. journalists how nothing the Sandinistas do--releasing prisoners, calling elections, restoring private enterprise, promising to reabsorb the Contras into the citizenry--satisfies the giant to the north. The U.S. “surrogate” army, the Contras, failed to overthrow the revolution, he said, but the United States persists in keeping the Contras alive, even after the five presidents of Central America agreed that the counterrevolutionaries would be demobilized by Dec. 5, before Nicaragua elections.

Tinoco said there were now more than 4,000 armed Contras in Nicaragua; he charged them with the murder of peasants as well as Sandinista soldiers, citing incidents when sleeping people were killed in their homes. “We’ve got dead bodies here,” he said. “We had to do something.”

But yes, he also said, if UNO were to win in February, the Sandinistas could accept that result and function as a political opposition, a strong opposition.

Cesar, over an alfresco breakfast at the Inter-Continental, said that a few months ago, “nobody gave a dime for the chances of the opposition; now, we’ve turned that completely around.” Wide-smiling, dressed like an Ivy League student, using fluent English, Cesar--a former Sandinista Cabinet member turned opposition leader--admitted that Contras had come over the Honduran border, but to campaign, not kill. Talks with Contra leaders during the summer of 1989 produced an agreement not to conduct military attacks during the election campaign, but UNO has no control of the military counterrevolutionaries.

He said there could be no post-election day peace without some support from the Sandinista military. Yes, he insisted, UNO is prepared to work with the military when the election is won. But could UNO work with the Sandinistas if the election is lost? Yes, he said again. Yet both sides have difficulty articulating what kind of accommodation could be made should the other side win.

Perhaps the brightest prospects come from beyond Nicaragua’s borders. Cesar reported that when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze came to visit the Sandinistas last month, he delivered a message of the need to reassess revolution and come to peaceful terms within the region, all but promising that the United States and the Soviets would be guarantors of a new global peace.

Tinoco, in turn, reminded people that his government has consistently been eager to pursue democracy: “The Sandinista movement has never been the revolution of Eastern Europe or even Cuba. The FSLN has, for 10 years, been a revolution of great flexibility and openness to political pluralism,” citing the elections of 1984 when the Sandinistas won easily if not conclusively. He wondered how the United States could now call Moscow the home of “good Communism” and Managua the home of “bad communism.” Nicaragua, he summed up, “has never been afraid of perestroika ; we think we invented it.”

U.S. citizens--media correspondents, representatives of church-affiliated groups and social-welfare organizations--move freely through this surreal, half-razed city. Farm animals graze next to railroad tracks, wildflowers bloom in empty parking lots. People in uniform rarely patrol the streets. Politicians from both sides come to meetings without armed guards. The citizens are cordial and the local rum is superb.

So the elections are coming. The larger answers must wait.