Venezuela’s opposition tries participation

Earlier this week we touched on the problems of presidential government, as currently being exhibited by the United States House of Representatives. But if you want to see the worst that the system can do, it’s hard to beat Venezuela.

This post from 2019 tells the story to that point. Briefly, leftist president Nicolás Maduro lost heavily in legislative elections in 2015 but didn’t get the message. Instead his rule became increasingly authoritarian, culminating in a dodgy presidential election in 2018 that supposedly won him a second five-year term. The legislature declared the election void and chose its speaker, Juan Guaidó, as acting president; he was recognised by the US and a number of other countries.

But from there, the revolution failed to boil over. International sanctions and domestic dissent both failed to topple Maduro, but they probably tempered his excesses and the two sides kept talking to each other. International support for Guaidó ultimately waned, and at the end of last year the opposition dissolved his interim government to focus on preparations for the 2024 presidential election.

Meanwhile, talks with the Maduro government had been suspended, but they resumed last week. Almost immediately an agreement was signed on measures that are supposed to facilitate the opposition’s participation in the election, including guarantees for its access to the media and for revision of the electoral roll. But many contentious issues have not been addressed, including the eligibility of opposition candidates that the government has previously disqualified on dubious grounds.

It was enough, though, for the opposition to proceed to hold a primary to select an agreed candidate to take on Maduro (who is assumed to be running for re-election). It was duly held last Sunday and resulted in a landslide victory for María Corina Machado: with 91.3% reporting she is said to have 92.4% of the vote, as against 4.6% for her main rival, Carlos Prosperi, and trivial amounts for eight others. More than two and a half million people voted.

But the way forward for Machado is far from clear, since she is one of the opposition figures to have already been targeted by the government – back in July she was disqualified for 15 years, supposedly for organising anti-government demonstrations. But from the opposition’s point of view, if those sorts of loaded decisions are not going to be reversed then there probably won’t be much point in participating anyway; that’s a bare minimum of what it expects its agreement with the government to produce.

Machado is from the centre-right, but if the election goes ahead she will be fronting a broad coalition. Given what Venezuela has been through, it seems inconceivable that Maduro could win a fair election, but nor does it seem likely that he will yield power peacefully. (And yet, authoritarians sometimes do.) At some point the opposition will probably have to decide just how much unfairness it can live with, and how it might react to a stolen election.

For the moment, however, constructive engagement by both sides is to be applauded. The international community, having failed to procure Maduro’s departure directly, may still be able to play an important role in ensuring that a serious agreement is reached and adhered to.