Elsewhere in election news, the dust is settling on Sunday’s presidential election in Nicaragua, and the news is bad for just about everyone except the man who is all but certainly the new president-elect, Daniel Ortega. Mr. Ortega’s name rings a bell because he has already taken a turn at leading the Central American country, as head of the Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN in the Spanish acronym. Mr. Ortega referred to the Soviet-Cuban playbook for everything from pointers on running his country’s economy into the ground to tips on how to repress political opponents.

His comeback is a story to mark. Back in 1999, Mr. Ortega, by then a professed Christian, joined the center-right president at the time, Arnoldo Aleman, in a notorious agreement known as The Pact under which Aleman’s party would divvy up control of the government with Mr. Ortega’s party. The agreement also enabled a presidential candidate to win on a smaller plurality than had been required before. Aleman now sits in jail, convicted of pocketing millions of government dollars and apparently hoping that Mr. Ortega will use the presidency to set him free. At least that would explain why Aleman’s allegedly center-right party has been working to thwart the credible run that was being made by an anti-corruption center-right candidate, Eduardo Montealegre. Aleman’s spoiler, Jose Rizo, threatens to split the anti-Ortega vote, clearing the way for the old Sandinista.

If, as looks increasingly likely, official returns confirm the finding of early tallies that Mr. Ortega has shuffled in, Nicaraguans will be the losers. It would already have taken the country 30 years to emerge from the hole Mr. Ortega dug them into during his first tour, and a second turn could add another 20 years to that total, an expert of Central America at the American Enterprise Institute, Roger Noriega, tells us. The prospect of an Ortega victory has already slowed capital flows into the country. Costa Rica and Honduras, Nicaragua’s neighbors, may start worrying about an influx of immigrants fleeing the economic and political havoc Mr. Ortega is sure to wreak.”A lot of people have seen how this movie ends,” Mr. Noriega says.

For America, certification of an Ortega victory will certainly be nettlesome. Most immediately, it would embolden Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Mr. Ortega is something of a Chavez acolyte, and his accession in Nicaragua would only bolster Mr. Chavez’s claim, such as it is, to be a regional big man even after he was just rebuffed by the U.N. General Assembly in his bid for a seat on the Security Council. Beyond that, Mr. Ortega’s suspicion of both America and markets could obstruct Nicaragua’s participation in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, though that would hurt Nicaragua more than America.

Whatever else this election says, it doesn’t necessarily say much about Mr. Ortega’s popularity. Should he indeed end up the winner, it will be partly because Aleman succeeded in splitting the vote and partly because Nicaraguans are fed up with the failure of their political class over the past 16 years to clean up crippling corruption and create greater economic opportunities. Since the voting age is 16, it’s conceivable that some who have voted for Mr. Ortega have no memory of his earlier rule. That a plurality will have elected him speaks volumes about the failure of the center-right parties that should have been stamping out corruption and fostering growth.