The Nicaraguan government has apologised to The Hague after an incident involving Dutch Euro MP Hans van Baalen. The right-wing Liberal urged Nicaragua's opposition to unite and to refuse to co-operate with the Ortega government.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega ordered the expulsion after the VVD politician called on the left-wing president to respect the constitution, saying, "Ortega is trying to bypass this article in the constitution illegally. The violation of civil rights is not just a national matter that can be ignored".
 

Last month, the Nicaragua Supreme Court scrapped the constitutional provision barring a president serving more than one term. The change effectively allows Mr Ortega, a former Sandinista revolutionary, to run for re-election in 2011.
 

The Dutch MEP was recently elected president of the International Liberals, an umbrella group representing more 100 liberal political parties across the globe, and is on a three-nation tour of Central America. He has been working hard behind the scenes to unite Nicaragua's Liberal parties, who have a majority in parliament but are divided by political infighting, to forget their differences and present a single candidate to run against President Ortega.
 

On Wednesday, Mr van Baalen held a press conference and told reporters he had been invited to leave the country by the Ortega government. Later, Nicaragua's Deputy Foreign Minister Manuel Coronel Kautz referred to Mr van Baalen as German and when informed that he was Dutch, the deputy minister said "that's even worse because the Netherlands is a paisucho (a shitty little country)".
 

President Ortega's government has apologised for Deputy Minister Coronel's comments but not for expelling Mr van Baalen as he "came as an envoy of interventionist foreign powers, forgetting that the new forms of interference and oppression are rejected by the people, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America".