In Nicaragua, Winning an Election Is Now a Coup.

It’s been said many times: You can vote a communist into office, but you can’t vote him out.

It’s a cliché because it’s true—and more than seven million Nicaraguans learned it the hard way today when President Daniel Ortega announced that their country would no longer hold elections.

But the most revealing word Ortega used wasn’t elections.

It was seize.

Explaining the decision, Ortega said opposition parties might otherwise use elections “to seize the government, to seize power.”

Seize it from whom?

Daniel Ortega, apparently.

In a democracy, the government doesn’t belong to the president. Political power is temporarily entrusted to him by the people, who retain the right to hand it to someone else. That's Democracy 101.

An opposition party that wins an election hasn’t seized anything. Voters have made a choice.

But Ortega doesn’t see it that way. He regards Nicaragua’s government as something that belongs to him, his wife and the Sandinistas. An election that removes them wouldn’t represent the will of the people. It would be the theft of their property.

That single word exposes the central fraud of communism.

Communism is advertised as the transfer of power to the people. Some people actually believe this. In practice, it transfers power to a small group of leaders who declare that they alone represent the people. Once that claim is accepted, there’s no legitimate way to remove them.

Supporting the regime means supporting the people. Opposing the regime means betraying the people. They can't lose.

Voting against the regime can’t possibly represent the will of the people because the regime has already declared itself the physical embodiment of that will.

The conclusion is built into the premise: anyone attempting to remove the leaders must be a traitor, a foreign agent or a coup plotter.

Ortega used all three accusations. He claimed Nicaragua’s opposition parties were created by “the Yankees” and controlled by supporters of the former Somoza dictatorship. He promised to build a legislative “wall” preventing them from ever returning to power.

Returning to power through an election, in other words, would itself be illegitimate.

The Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979. Ortega now treats that revolution as a deed granting his movement permanent ownership of Nicaragua. Nearly half a century later, the revolution still supposedly gives him the right to decide who may govern—and whether Nicaraguans may choose at all.

The Sandinistas didn’t end family dictatorship in Nicaragua. They merely replaced one ruling family with another. Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, is now formally his co-president.

But Ortega’s story contains one important wrinkle: Nicaragua actually did vote him out once.

In 1990, Ortega lost the presidency and left office. Sixteen years later, Nicaraguan voters returned him to power with just 38 percent of the vote. He then spent the next two decades making certain that what happened in 1990 could never happen again.

He consolidated control over the courts and legislature. Presidential term limits disappeared. Opposition parties were outlawed. Presidential challengers were imprisoned. His wife was elevated to share the presidency. Elections continued, but only after the possibility of removing Ortega had been engineered out of them.

Now he no longer sees any need to maintain the performance.

The familiar warning is that communists can be voted into power but can’t be voted out. Nicaragua’s history is more instructive than that. Ortega was voted out. He accepted the result, waited for another opportunity and used democracy to return.

Then he dismantled it from the inside.