New Delhi, July 22 -- "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue," wrote Francois de la Rochefoucauld, a French moralist. This is especially true in politics. Autocrats usually put on a big show of holding elections. These may be phony, as in Russia or Iran, but they allow rulers to claim to govern by popular consent, which lends them the appearance of legitimacy at home and abroad.

So it is highly unusual for the leader of a country that holds elections to say: no more. Yet that is what Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's co-president, did on July 19th. "There will never be elections here again," he announced, while the world's attention was on the football World Cup final. He complained that opposition parties wanted to use elections "to...