Setting the scene
Before we get into this commentary on the recent Venezuelan elections, it is necessary to go back to 1989. In response to neoliberal austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a wave of spontaneous protests erupted from the barrios (working class neighbourhoods) of Caracas. The protesters were met with severe repression and violence and 400 Venezuelans were massacred in what is remembered as the 'Caracazo'. Commentators agree that this was origin of Chavismo, the political movement named after the late president Hugo Chávez, that swept to power – after an aborted military coup in 1992 – in democratic elections in 1998. Chávez treated the Caracazo as a popular rebellion and, for the first time in Venezuelan democratic history, a new political project put “el pueblo” (the people) centre stage. This moment exploded the façade of liberal democratic politics that had treated Venezuela, and its oil wealth, as a revolving door of elite power shared by the two main parties since 1958.
Once one of Spain’s poorest colonies, Venezuela was first integrated into global capitalism via the export of coffee and cocoa from slave plantations. The nation was irrevocably transformed in the early 20th century when vast deposits of “black gold” turned Venezuela into an overwhelmingly urban and oil‐dependent nation. Naming it the Bolivarian Revolution, after the 19th century independence leader Simón Bolívar, Chávez withstood a US-backed coup attempt in 2002 after el pueblo rose up from the Barrios of Caracas and demanded their president’s return (see the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised). The new government then overcame the sabotage of the oil industry, an economic strike by the business community, and a recalcitrant economic elite baulking at mild reforms centred on land redistribution and social spending. In response, Chávez radicalised the Bolivarian Revolution in the name of “el pueblo”, declaring 21st century socialism in 2005 and winning re-election in 2006. As I have written elsewhere (see here), from a critical political economy perspective, many of the contradictions of this ‘socialist’ project were sown by Chávez. Despite the extremely impressive halving of poverty between 2003 and 2011, as well massive investments in education and healthcare, Chávez centralised power in the hands of the presidency as well as the military. The attempt to build an oil-financed parallel development state organised around “social missions” never encroached on the fundamental social relations of capitalism. A disastrous mismanagement of the economy revolved around price and currency controls which institutionalised corruption. To boot, radical industrial and agricultural policies, such as co-management schemes and state-run farms, were structurally reliant on oil-financed subsidies and never cohered into credible project of planned development.
Bolivarian rentier capitalism
In the meantime, the Chavistas have had 25 years in power, 11 of which have been under the rule of Nicolás Maduro, who Chávez anointed as his successor before succumbing to cancer in 2013. To say things have gone downhill for the Bolivarian Revolution from here, would be to put it mildly. Factional struggles within the government ensued and Chavistas, unhappy with corruption and ideologically committed to the ideals of a socialist project, lost power and influence. In their stead the so-called “Bolibourgeoisie” – bureaucrats, high-ranking personnel within the military, and insider businessmen – took over and deepened lucrative money-making schemes from their positions within the oil state.
When oil prices fell in 2014, wages had already plummeted by 80 per cent, food shortages were spreading, and the economy had been a period of contraction. Ironically, neoliberal-style austerity measures have been rolled out by Maduro ever since the 2014 decision to pay off external debt by cutting food imports. Importantly, an economic disaster was playing out well before the impact of US sanctions on the Maduro regime took root in 2017. With falling oil prices, dwindling reserves and ballooning inflation, Maduro attempted to attract international capital with a decree creating special economic zones and incentives to exploit mineral deposits at the Arco Minero del Orinoco. A dictatorial political regime was ensconced by 2016 and, until 2018, the overvalued exchange rate, foreign exchange controls, and the import economy – the economic levers to capture Venezuela’s oil money – remained under the oversight of military interests arrayed around Chávez’ one-time vice president and current Deputy of the National Assembly Diosdado Cabello. Since 2018, under a militarised national populism, some measure of economic liberalisation was introduced by eliminating tariffs on several imported products, lifting price and exchange controls with a hefty devaluation of the Bolivar, and permitting a de facto dollarization of the economy. GDP growth returned in 2022 and luxury consumption abounds in elite neighbourhoods of Caracas.
During this period, organised labour has been repressed, losing the right to strike and collective bargaining, union leaders and political activists have been imprisoned and wages have been replaced by salary bonds and government food baskets to keep people turning up to work. Many Venezuelans now live in the most extreme poverty ever seen in the country, without access to reliable public services and healthcare. In the interim, 7.7 million people have fled and the five million officially registered in foreign countries do not have the right to vote. A divided and disorganised opposition had been embroiled in a chaotic period of abstaining from elections, engaging violent street protests (mainly in wealthy neighbourhoods), and, for a brief period, a young politician named Juan Guaidó was declared interim president gaining support from Washington in the hope of regime change. To support this foreign policy, the US ramped up economic sanctions designed to restrict food supplies and oil equipment which, at the same time, increased the plausibility of Maduro’s claim that Venezuela was the victim of an economic war. Both sides have been brought to the ballot box as a result of the Barbados Agreements signed in October 2023 to advance dialogue, ease sanctions in return for the release of political prisoners, and establish general guidelines for the presidential elections that were held on Sunday. This rather extended background should be read to centre the main protagonist in this saga, the Venezuelan people who went to the polls on Sunday, 28 July, to elect a new president.
An election story foretold
Before I go into the details of the unfolding electoral drama, readers should be aware that a generalised Manichean mind-set has long characterised Venezuelan politics. Nuanced views – across large swathes the media, domestic political interests and actors, and the international left and right etc – are not easy to come by as each side pushes towards the ends of its own agenda. Be these foregone narratives about dictatorial political fraud or a romanticised, and often Eurocentric, defence of revolutionary socialism, all tend to flatten political complexity. In what follows, based on reading many X (Twitter) accounts and various news sources in Spanish and English (for more time than is probably healthy), I have based this on journalistic and activist reporting from the ground, as well as academics and international electoral observers and commentators looking for careful evaluation rather than fast and ready political conclusions. The aim here is to offer a critical disposition, one that charts a clear path away from obdurate international factions of the anti-imperialist left who like to claim that to be critical of Maduro is to be complicit with a neofascist right backed by US imperialism.
Among a field of 10 candidates, Maduro was mainly up against the unity candidate of four opposition parties, Edmundo González Urrutia, a relatively unknown 74-year-old retired diplomat. This mattered little because the real opposition candidate, previously disqualified from holding public office after calling for foreign intervention in Venezuela, is María Corina Machado. Focusing less on her economic plans for large scale privatisation and her admiration for Margaret Thatcher and Benjamin Netanyahu, Machado ran on a message of national unity and the reunification of millions of Venezuelan families torn apart by a long economic crisis and outmigration. Her campaign saw an outpouring of public support, with well-attended mass rallies across the country. On Sunday, 28 July, Venezuelans turned out peacefully in large numbers, waiting patiently from 6am, to cast their votes using electronic machines at more than 16,000 polling stations across the country. In the run up, opinion polls, unsurprisingly, predicted wildly varying results attached to polarised narratives. Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez attempted to control for biases in previous poll predictions and his results, published in a Twitter thread, suggested a very tight race.
Following a six-hour delay, in the early hours of Monday, 29 July, Elvis Amoroso, the president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced a Maduro victory with 51.2 per cent (five million) of votes compared with 44.2 per cent (4.4 million) for his rival, Edmundo González Urrutia. According to Amoroso, the election results were delayed by an “attack on the transmission system” and urged authorities to investigate. Maduro, for his part was triumphant declaring that “fascism shall not pass in the land of Bolívar and Chávez” and that the CNE was the victim of a “terrorist” attack by “demons” that will be crushed with an “iron fist”.
As the drama unfolded, however, a different picture emerged. With 80 per cent of the votes counted, the CNE had proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner but without the records to back up to the total. One of the binds that the government finds itself in is that Venezuela’s electronic voting system is so good that it should be straightforward to prove the “demonic attack” and publish the fully counted results. There are safeguards in place. First, the number of electronic votes must tally with a paper backup that is deposited in a ballot box. Second, after the polls close 55 per cent of the voting machines are randomly chosen for an audit to compare the electronic and physical tallies (called actas). Third, participating organisations have public witnesses at voting stations and they must sign off on the final tally (acta) which later will be published on the CNE website.
Alas, none of this has come to pass. The opposition managed to record 40 per cent of the printed tallies (actas) at the polling stations before reports emerged about members of the military removing boxes of printed results. Then the transmission of data from polling stations was abruptly halted and opposition witnesses were prevented from supervising the handling of data. Suddenly, at 9pm, the CNE announced it had found 40 per cent more of the electronic tallies and proceeded to offer its calculation on 80 per cent of the votes counted. At the time of publication, the CNE had failed to audit the results or publish anything on its website.
For its part, the opposition announced that it had recovered 73.25 per cent of the physical tallies. The results recorded, it was being argued, showed a difference of 3.5 million votes with 6,275,182 in favour of Edmundo Gonzalez and 2,759,256 for Nicolás Maduro which is 67 per cent and 29 per cent of the recorded votes respectively. María Corina Machado told reporters that González was Venezuela’s new president-elect and that “we had an overwhelming victory and everyone knows it”. One of the international election observers invited by the Maduro government, US based The Carter Centre, called upon Venezuela’s CNE to immediately publish the presidential election results at the polling station level before it would be willing to offer any legitimate verification. The Maduro government doubled down, expelling diplomats from countries that refused to recognise the election results and Diosdado Cabello called for the arrest of Edmundo González and María Machado. At the same time, US President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a joint announcement calling for the immediate and full release of voting data.
Yet, as the usual wrangling and finger pointing intensified, something novel happened, spontaneous protests emerged from the barrios of Caracas (such as Petare and Catia) and in cities across the country. Once Chavista strongholds have rejected the election result as a fraud and called for an end to the Maduro dictatorship, shouting “we are not scared”. There is astonishing footage online of protesters tearing down statues of Hugo Chávez across numerous cities in the country. So far, the protests have been violently repressed and at least nine people are reported dead from gunshots. In the following days, the Bolivarian Revolution may well be brought to its denouement by the same people that came down from the barrios in 1989, el pueblo.