María Corina Machado greets her voters at a campaign rally in Valencia, Venezuela.Ariana Cubillos (AP)
The Venezuelan opposition is looking for a rival for Maduro. 21 million Venezuelans will vote this Sunday in Venezuela and abroad among ten candidates in a consultation in which the conservative María Corina Machado is the big favorite. These primaries come after Nicolás Maduro’s government and the opposition agreed this week in Barbados to respect the constitutional calendar and hold presidential elections in the second half of 2024. A day later, the United States eased sanctions on the oil and gas sector. Gas until six months, which will only be extended if Maduro continues to take steps to restore democracy in the country and allows an opposition candidate to truly challenge him for power.
The road to holding this consultation has been long and bumpy. The government has not made it any easier to celebrate by adopting an ambiguous attitude towards the National Electoral Council (CNE) and only offering its help at the last minute. In the end, the opponents themselves, supported by the parties and civil society, were responsible for the logistics, which raised many doubts. Voting will take place in 3,010 voting centers and 5,134 polling stations in Venezuela and in 28 countries, including Germany, Colombia, Mexico, Ireland, Norway, Spain and the United States. The stakes are huge and the difficulties are not small. Venezuelans in their country who want to participate will have to find their voting center on a website that they can only access via VPN because internet service providers have blocked access.
The opposition has never managed to remain united against Chavismo, and the primaries were no exception. One of the country’s most prominent opponents, Henrique Capriles, resigned two weeks ago, saying he was disqualified and could not run for president. Another party, Fuerza Vecinal, suggested suspending the consultation. There are also those who have chosen not to join this goal and have announced that they will appear alone, such as Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia, an opponent who coexists peacefully with Chavismo. The government has benefited from ongoing internal disputes between opponents during its 20 years in power, first under Hugo Chávez and then under Maduro.
Machado’s more than likely victory raises many more questions. The politician received a veto from control a few months ago, preventing her from running as a presidential candidate. What happens if he wins? The Barbados agreement states that approval is encouraged “for all candidates and political parties” to participate in the 2024 elections, but warns that this will be “as long as the requirements established by law are met.” . Analysts believe Chavismo will under no circumstances allow Machado to run in the elections against Maduro, who is doing poorly in the polls. And even less one where there will be international observers, as agreed. The idea is that Maduro would have everything to lose in free and fair elections, as doubts remain about the actual progress of these recent agreements.
Barinas’ strategy
A part of the opposition believes that the best way to circumvent the sanctions is to use the strategy of Barinas, the home region of Hugo Chávez, where an opposition party surprisingly won in regional elections at the end of 2021. The winner is Freddy Superlano was retroactively disqualified and the Supreme Court ordered a repeat election. The issue was more than symbolic, since the Chavista candidate was Jorge Arreaza, Chávez’s former son-in-law. Opponents introduced candidates from the Superlano circle and one by one they were explicitly sidelined by the CNE, Chavismo’s strategy to get rid of competitors.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
In the end, one was accepted, Sergio Garrido, who faced Arreaza in January 2022. And he beat him. It turned out that it wasn’t the name on the ballot that mattered, but rather that the opposition was united. Those opponents who believe that this tactic – announcing names until Chavismo is forced to accept one – could be successful do not know what position Machado will take, whether he will resign if it is unauthorized, or whether he will prevent anyone from replacing them. Nor was it clear that if she were ultimately prevented from registering as a candidate, her spot in the primary would be taken by the runner-up.
The consultation did not have a positive wind. Organizers faced many obstacles in setting up voting centers. There are places that are being relocated due to government pressure on the institutions that provided them. A rainy day is also expected, so polling stations located on the street without awnings could be at risk. And there are also problems with media reporting. The National Press Union has reported that journalists and radio media directors were pressured to end their limited coverage of the trial from Friday evening. In any case, in the latest Delphos polls a week ago, 66.7% of the population said they were willing to take part in the elections this Sunday, although only 20% of this group indicated a high or very high probability of doing so.
The primaries will take place at a time of opening in Venezuela. The United States has reached out to Maduro and partially lifted sanctions, which will undoubtedly help improve the struggling local economy. At the time, the Venezuelan president said there would be no free elections in 2024 unless the country was freed from sanctions. Now that Washington has taken a first step, it is Maduro’s turn to take a step. Just hours after the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) approved transactions related to operations in the oil and gas sector, Maduro released five political prisoners, including journalist Roland Carreño, who had been imprisoned for three years. The rapprochement between the two countries implicitly implies that Chavismo will respect the primaries and will do so in next year’s presidential elections.
In this race there must be a consensus opposition candidate emerging from this Sunday’s consultation. It would be the first time in ten years that the opponents would unite to defeat Chavismo. It remains to be seen whether they will run in these elections with guarantees and on equal terms – which seems unlikely – but at least they have done their job. This time, not participating was not an option in order not to play into the hands of Chavismo, as was the case in the 2020 parliamentary elections.
/p>
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_