In Venezuela’s presidential election on July 28, Edmundo González won about two-thirds of the vote, routing the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro—but Maduro declared victory, anyway. While the country’s National Electoral Council, which Maduro appointed, said he’d won 51 percent of the vote, paper receipts from across the country showed a landslide for González.
More than a decade ago, Maduro was chosen by his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez—the socialist populist who dominated his Venezuelan politics from 1998 until his death in 2013—to replace him. Like Chávez, Maduro ruled as an autocrat—and drove the country’s economy to ruin. Venezuela’s abundance of oil once made it among Latin America’s wealthiest countries; now, about 82 percent of the population lives in poverty.
After Maduro claimed victory in July, protests broke out across Venezuela, and the regime responded with mass arrests. The U.S. and dozens of other Western countries have recognized González’s victory and called on Maduro to step down—but the authoritarian powers of China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba are still backing him, while the regional players of Brazil and Mexico are working to negotiate a way out of the impasse.
So how long can Maduro hang on?
Moisés Naím—Venezuela’s former minister of trade and industry, and the former director of its Central Bank—is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the author of The Revenge of Power. To Naím, Maduro can still count on two sources of power: international support and domestic repression. China is backing Caracas in multilateral organizations, while Cuba is effectively managing the Venezuelan economy—and security forces are crushing the opposition at home. Still, Naím says, the resounding electoral defeat caught Maduro and the government by surprise; and video footage spreading on social media of authorities torturing people from the opposition suggests what such violence often suggests: The regime is anxious …
Michael Bluhm: Maduro has legitimately won elections in the past, as Chávez did before him. Why did so many Venezuelans vote against Maduro this time?
Ricardo Paredes
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