Opposition parties are gearing up their campaigns for presidential primaries due on 22 October. But a fair election process will require some government input, and it is far from clear if that will be forthcoming.
One prominent opposition leader, former interim president Juan Guaidó, of the Voluntad Popular (VP) party, indicated on 7 March that he will stand in the primaries ahead of the 2024 general elections. Henrique Capriles Radonski, who stood unsuccessfully as opposition presidential candidate in 2012 and 2018 for Primero Justicia (PJ), has also thrown his hat in the ring, as has the more radical opposition leader María Corina Machado of Vente Venezuela. More are likely to follow. PJ has announced it will be holding nationwide public consultations on a future programme of government.
While the parties are throwing themselves with relish into campaigning, a critical question is whether the government will help or hinder the primaries. First, candidates like Guaidó and Capriles are subject to government-backed court rulings banning them from holding elective office for 15 years, alleging a series of administrative violations. The opposition assumption is that these bans will eventually be lifted as part of the slow moving, Mexico-based government-opposition dialogue on a political settlement. There is also a hope that these and various other restrictions will be dropped as a quid pro quo after the recent relaxation of US oil sanctions. But this is uncertain, and serious doubts remain over whether the government led by President Nicolás Maduro is really disposed to allow free and fair elections. A tactic used by the government in the past could also be repeated – getting biddable courts to seize control of certain political parties or to remove their legal rights to slogans and symbols.
The opposition’s organising committee, the Comisión Nacional de Primaria (CNP), is looking for technical support from the government-controlled national electoral commission (CNE). CNE help would be needed, for example, to gain access to polling stations and other electoral infrastructure. It would also be needed if there is to be some form of overseas or postal voting. It is estimated that over 7m Venezuelans have left the country.
The electoral register was last updated in 2022, and totalled 21.09m citizens, of whom 107,000 were overseas. The real proportion of voters outside Venezuela is believed to be much higher than those figures suggest and is estimated by some to be one in five – who if they register would represent an important block of voters likely to sympathise with the opposition cause. The question is whether the CNE will be inclined to help register and manage them.
Ten Years after Chávez
The Maduro government marked the tenth anniversary of the death of former president Hugo Chávez, who held power from 1999 until his death from cancer on 5 March 2013, with speeches calling for revolutionary unity and ceremonies attended by, among others, leftist leaders including Bolivia’s President Luis Arce and former president Evo Morales (2006-2019), Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, Ecuador’s former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), Honduras’s former president Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009), and Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro (2006-2018). Maduro spoke of the need to maintain “political ideological and moral unity” so as to defeat “divisionist forces”.
Political analysts note that Chávez remains highly popular despite being dead. According to a recent poll by Datanálisis, 53% of respondents have a “positive valuation” of Chávez, compared with only 22% for Maduro, his successor.
Chávez
Luis Vicente León, the executive director of Datanálisis, said the high support for Hugo Chávez in the polling company’s most recent survey could be because, like Hollywood movie stars Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, Chávez died at the peak of his popularity and has now become a kind of ‘frozen’ icon. In the popular imagination Chávez does not seem to be associated with the subsequent collapse of the Venezuelan economy, although León says it was implicit in his economic model based on short-term use of oil revenues, expropriations, populism, and unfunded public spending.