Last revolution of the 20th century, the Sandinista revolution of July 19, 1979, embodied the hope of a “third way”, a composite government, committed itself to promote a democratic and non-aligned regime. Yet two years later, the country entered a new phase of civil war pitting the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against a plethora of armed opponents supported by the United States. This shift from a situation in which a pluralist and non-aligned government saw one of its components, the FSLN transform itself into a party state with totalitarian pretensions, has been subject to two major interpretations. The first sees the rise in strength of the FSLN as the result of a “radicalization” of the popular sectors accentuated by the aggression of the United States. The second, on the contrary, emphasizes how the new course of events was the result of the Sandinistas’ desire to impose their hegemony, to build a regime allied to the Soviet bloc and, in so doing, to break a nascent democratic regime.This is another reading of the events that we want to suggest. If the revolution of July 19, 1979 did put an end to a dictatorship, if it asserted itself as pluralist and non-aligned, it did not institute a democratic-liberal matrix that would later be subverted by the FSLN alone. The various revolutionary components revived the old system of oligarchic pacts that had been in force before the Somoza seizure of power. They admired the new contenders for power, the FSLN and new parties, but they preserved all the existing political habits: the idea that politics should be in the hands of a few, the preference for coups de force and top-down arrangements at the expense of periodic and regular questioning of power. Similarly, they all held in suspicion, for different reasons, the democratic principles of the separation of powers and social self-constitution.It was within this framework that the FSLN organized its takeover of the new State apparatus, while its rival associates played with it the game that had long been the game of honour under the Somoza dictatorship. All of them were eager to enter into a pact with the FSLN with the primary concern of defending purely categorical interests and participation in a system of prebends. This bureaucratization “from above” was accompanied by bureaucratization “from below”. The FSLN was able to attract to itself a whole range of women and men aspiring to new responsibilities and destinies, women and men who populated the FSLN’s mass organizations and the new state institutions. In other words, while the first year of the revolution was clearly characterized by the establishment of the power of a party state with totalitarian pretensions, this change was articulated and based on the refurbishment of the old Nicaraguan political habits, what Charles Anderson called the “game of competitors for power”, not on the subversion of a democratic regime in which very few Nicaraguans had faith at the beginning of the revolution.