Venezuela splits the left

One small curiosity in my reading yesterday on Venezuela was that the report in the New York Times appeared under the byline of Anatoly Kurmanaev, who is the paper’s Russian correspondent. In fact, although he grew up in Russia, he lived and worked in Venezuela for eight years, so it’s not really so strange, but it’s rather symbolic of the geopolitical context in which the country’s fraudulent election needs to be understood.

There doesn’t seem to have been much development in the story since yesterday. Nicolás Maduro still seems committed to toughing it out, and there is no sign yet of the cracks in the regime that will be necessary to unseat him. But international opinion continues to run strongly against him, including, interestingly, among most of his neighbors.

Until a year or two ago the left had been on a roll in Latin America, and as a result the majority of governments in the region can now be described as left-wing, at least in a broad sense (Argentina is the biggest of the exceptions). Some when elected would have been described as centre-left, some as far left, but their behavior in office has not always reflected those distinctions.

Now the Venezuelan electoral fraud has opened up a clear fault line. Maduro has a hard core of supporters, but they are relatively minor players: Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua. But other left-wing leaders have been at the forefront of demands that Maduro deliver on his democratic promises, especially those of Brazil, Colombia and Chile. Right-wing governments in Argentina, Costa Rica and Uruguay have echoed the same demands in more strident terms.

This division is not really new; it was already in evidence in the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Only six countries in the region have failed to support the three General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion, and they include Venezuela and its four supporters. The sixth is El Salvador, whose president is authoritarian but not really on the left – he denounced the fraud on Monday.

So it’s not just the right (including the far right) that has to decide whether or not to stand by democracy. Left-wing parties around the world are being put on the spot in the same way. Do they side with the traditional leftist values of openness and democracy, or do they line up with the Maduros and the Putins, whose claim to be on the “left” amounts to hostility to capitalism and the United States?

Last month in France we saw the left choose democracy, and now its leading lights in South America are doing the same thing. Many on the right, however, have not got the message. A missive yesterday from Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs, which has now gone full Trumpist, rants against the threat that Kamala Harris supposedly poses to democracy in America, and as an apparent afterthought inserts a condemnation of Maduro. In a similar fashion, some of Putin’s strongest critics on the right are also gushing fans of his occasional ally, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But democracy is a package deal. Undermining it in one country weakens it everywhere. The defenders of civilisation need to stick together, now more than ever.