Now, after a decade of economic calamity and political repression, Venezuela stands on the brink of once-unfathomable change. A presidential election Sunday could see Maduro not just lose, but lose by a landslide. Opinion polls have him trailing the opposition challenger, Edmundo González — a soft-spoken, 74-year-old former diplomat who became the candidate after authorities disqualified popular opposition leader María Corina Machado — by double digits. It’s far from clear whether Maduro will stomach defeat and allow such an outcome, but his opponents are hopeful.
“We are confident that our margin of victory will be so overwhelming that it will open a new political reality in the country and that will open spaces for negotiation,” González told my colleagues earlier this month.
“If the margin is as wide as we expect it to be, it’ll be something that’s impossible to hide, and the legitimacy of the regime will have vanished,” Roberto Patiño, a prominent social activist and community organizer, told me this week. Maduro, sensing the narrowing of his political horizons, recently scare-mongered about an opposition victory, saying it would lead to “a fratricidal civil war provoked by fascists” and warned of a “bloodbath.”
Maduro sits atop the hollowed-out ruin of the socialist state Chávez built. The latter’s populist pitch and redistributive zeal won him a huge base of support in the country, which at the turn of the 20th century was one of the richest in Latin America but also one of the most unequal. But years of kleptocracy and mismanagement wrecked the critical Venezuelan oil industry and ravaged the country’s economy. U.S. sanctions and the toll of the pandemic haven’t helped either. As a result, close to 8 million Venezuelans — roughly a quarter of the population — have been forced to flee the country as economic migrants, an exodus that’s trailed its way across the hemisphere, and up to the United States’ southern border. For many who remain, including vast segments of the working class that once supported Chávez, a vote against the regime offers a glimmer of hope.
The impoverishment of the country has been accompanied by mounting autocracy. “Politically, the regime is no longer properly populist. But neither is it leftist, like Chile or Brazil. Venezuela is a political-military dictatorship akin to Russia and Iran — and above all Cuba, its ideological ally,” wrote Enrique Krauze in The Washington Post’s opinion pages. “The specific instrument of power has been co-optation and repression — of political parties, candidates, business executives, academics, students and journalists. Separation of powers, freedom of expression, guarantees of individual rights and confidence in the electoral system — all these things have long since disappeared in Venezuela.”
Analysts expect a change in leadership can start a new chapter for the country and inch it toward fiscal stability and better economic prospects. But even if the Maduro regime allows the election to take place and the opposition to win, few expect a straightforward transition. “It’s necessary to recognize that changing an authoritarian system does not happen overnight,” Patiño told me.
Even if Maduro loses, his allies will still dominate the country’s judiciary, its rubber-stamp legislature, and the armed forces. Most of the country’s major provincial governors and city mayors are in Maduro’s camp. The opposition anticipates some process of negotiation with Maduro that can give him a gentle off-ramp. Patiño pointed to historical precedents for such processes in how Chile moved away from dictator Augusto Pinochet or Venezuela’s own toppling of its military dictatorship in 1958.
But that’s all still hypothetical. The opposition has had to wage an election campaign with all the cards stacked against it. Machado won an opposition primary last year that saw huge turnout and galvanized momentum for change. The vote was allowed to take place after negotiations between Maduro’s regime and the Biden administration, which relaxed some oil sanctions as an incentive; those were reinstated in April, however, after Venezuela’s Supreme Court controversially disqualified Machado from holding public office.
Nonetheless, Machado has remained the face of the opposition, and barnstormed her way through the country despite a huge slate of restrictions on the opposition’s ability to hold events and widespread arrests of her colleagues. The campaign operates on word-of-mouth, social media and sheer public enthusiasm. “When I go to an event, I don’t know if I’ll have a stage, I don’t know if I’ll have sound, I don’t know if I’ll have transportation,” Machado told my colleagues Ana Vanessa Herrero and Samantha Schmidt. “We are breaking all the myths of a political campaign.”
The moment marks a departure from an earlier period when the opposition would eschew participation in elections held by the Maduro regime on grounds that they were illegitimate. “We realized that boycotting elections and hoping the international community will do the job is no longer going to work,” Patiño told me. “All change has to come from within. The starting point is the Venezuelan people.”
Still, he acknowledges that international pressure and engagement is vital in a scenario where Maduro has to face defeat. Positive signals came earlier this week from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist with a close relationship to the late Chavez. He warned against Maduro’s “bloodbath” rhetoric.
“I have told Maduro that the only chance for Venezuela to return to normality is to have a widely respected electoral process,” he told reporters Monday. “He has to respect the democratic process.”
The Biden administration, too, may yet be able to claim a major foreign policy win should the election pave the way for Maduro’s exit.
“A year ago the naysayers would have said none of this is going to happen, the opposition will never unite, the regime will never allow an election,” a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration, told my colleagues. “The fact that we’ve come this far I think is a significant statement that the effort was worth it.”
