The Story Behind the Venezuelan Elections

The Story Behind the Venezuelan Elections
Moisés Naím - Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie's International Economics
Program; Author "The End of Power"
Posted: 12/05/2015 4:49 pm EST Updated: 12/05/2015 4:59 pm EST

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's president, recently announced that if the
opposition were to gain a majority in the National Assembly in elections
this Sunday, "We would not give up the revolution and ... we would
govern with the people in a civil-military union." To ensure that no one
would accuse him of not being a true democrat, he clarified that "we
would do this with the constitution in hand." The president conveniently
ignored the small detail that the constitution does not have any
provision for a "civil-military" government, nor does it give the
government the option of disregarding the outcome of an election. What
Maduro did stress however was that "if the revolution fails, there will
be a massacre"--a threat he has repeatedly made throughout the campaign.
He usually follows such threats with reassurances that this violence
will not ensue, as it is impossible for opposition candidates to win
enough votes for a legislative majority, which Maduro's party has
enjoyed for the past 17 years.

Maduro, in fact, frequently dismisses the very notion of an opposition
victory as, in his cryptic words, a "negated and transmuted scenario."
His self-assurance is surprising considering that almost all opinion
polls show an overwhelming public rejection of the government in general
and the president in particular. So why is Maduro so confident? There
are many reasons, the majority of which have nothing to do with "free
and fair elections." (Disclosure: I served as Venezuela's minister of
trade and industry and director of its Central Bank from 1989 to 1990.)

One of these reasons is that public employees in Venezuela may be
inclined to vote for the government's candidates. Maduro perhaps knows
that there are thousands of government managers like Miguel Montañes,
who is in charge of customs at the international airport in Maracaibo,
the country's second-largest city. An employee caught Montañes on tape
conducting a town-hall meeting in which he menacingly ordered all his
personnel to vote for regime candidates and bring in a picture of their
ballot the day after the election to prove that they voted "correctly."
Maduro also knows he can count on the massive and unaccountable use of
public funds and resources to support his candidates. His faith in the
impossibility of the "transmuted scenario" is surely bolstered by the
aggressive and frequent deployment of dirty tricks to defame opposition
leaders, and jailing them or preventing them from running for office.
The opposition has also had to contend with "armed people's militias"
that violently attack opposition marches and sometimes even murder their
leaders as it recently happened to Luis Manuel Diaz.

And then there's the government's grip on the media. Not only has there
been a wave of acquisitions of Venezuela's main television channels,
radio stations, and newspapers by "private investors" who, upon gaining
control of a given property, convert it into a government propaganda
organ, but the few media companies that are still independent are
severely limited in terms of what they can broadcast or publish. A
recent study by Javier Corrales and Franz Von Bergen of what appears on
Venezuelan television (both private and public channels) showed that
opposition candidates for the National Assembly were rarely
mentioned--unless they were being denounced--while the regime's
candidates were omnipresent and extolled. A revealing indicator of this
strict censorship of the media is the fact that there has been no
mention on national television of the arrest in Haiti of two of the
first lady's nephews, who are accused of trafficking 800 kilos of
cocaine and are currently being processed in a Manhattan court.
High-ranking Venezuelan officials have increasingly been seeking asylum
in the United States and making serious revelations about the criminal
behavior of their former bosses and colleagues in government.

All this seems to have awoken the leadership of the 35-country
Organization of American States (OAS) from its decade-long complacency
with the undemocratic behavior of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo
Chavez, who died in 2013. The body's new secretary general, Uruguay's
Luis Almagro, recently sent a 19-page letter to Tibisay Lucena, the
director of the National Electoral Council (NEC), detailing the
irregularities and abuses of the electoral system over which she has
presided since 2006. In his letter, Almagro concluded that the upcoming
December 6 elections are not sure to operate "at the level of
transparency and electoral justice that [the NEC] should guarantee." He
also dared to publicly condemn the murder of an opposition leader at a
campaign rally, which led to this thoughtfully worded reaction from the
Venezuelan head of state: "to call Almagro a piece of garbage is an
insult to garbage itself."

Almagro's rebuke is one of many signs of the erosion of the complacency
with which the international community and especially other Latin
American governments greeted the Venezuelan government's thuggish
behavior for the last 15 years. Cristina Kirchner, Argentina's outgoing
president and a stalwart ally of the Chavez/Maduro regime, no longer
wields the power that she and her late husband did earlier this century.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, another loyal supporter of the
regime, is ensnared in a major corruption scandal and the subject of
congressional impeachment proceedings. Cuba, a major partner of
Venezuela's, is "normalizing" its relations with the United States.
Praise of Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" from liberals around the
world has grown fainter. The regime has even lost the sympathy and
support of Noam Chomsky, an icon of the global left who was once an
erstwhile admirer. Maduro has been receiving letters and petitions from
foreign governments, multilateral bodies like the European Union,
human-rights organizations, politicians, parliamentarians, artists and
intellectuals, former presidents and current heads of state like the
U.K.'s David Cameron and Spain's Mariano Rajoy, demanding the release of
political prisoners and clean elections. In the US, Barack Obama, Joseph
Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton also have repeatedly asked the
Maduro administration to respect human rights and ensure clean elections.

When Chavez was alive and oil prices were high, his charisma,
popularity, and generous checkbook went far in buying the goodwill and
tolerance of other governments toward Venezuela's "revolution". Maduro
is not Chavez, and oil prices have plummeted. Equally important is that
the Bolivarian Revolution has become hard to defend. It suffers from the
highest inflation on the planet, a deep and prolonged recession,
widespread and chronic shortages of basic staples and medicines,
crumbling public services, one the world's highest murder rates, and
rampant and unprecedented levels of corruption. Venezuela is looking
more and more like a failed state than a prosperous petrostate with the
world's largest oil reserves.

So, given this context, what will happen in Venezuela on Sunday? I see
three scenarios (none of them transmuted):

1) The government steals the election by either suspending the race or
orchestrating a major fraud.

2) The government reveals itself to be a miracle worker, wining with a
clean fight and proving all the polls wrong.

3) The government lets the opposition win--for a while. Maduro could
concede victory to his opponents, which would legitimize him before the
world and relieve some of the international pressure he's facing. His
allies would declare that once more Venezuela has confirmed that it is a
democracy, and that there is therefore no need to meddle in its internal
politics and governance. Shortly thereafter it uses its control of the
judiciary to water down the powers of the National Assembly.

As Maduro has repeteadly stated that the government will do "whatever it
takes" to win this election a combination of the first two scenarios is
obviouly probable. Yet, I believe that the third scenario is even more
probable. Maduro concedes that the opposition won a majority of the
Assembly but then proceeds to curb its traditional powers. It may, for
example cut its operating budget, persuade or cajole newly elected
opposition deputies into switching sides or stealthily undermine the
effectiveness of the opposition with filibusters and delaying tactics .
Its control of the judiciary and the supreme court enables the
Bolivarians to pass all kinds of measures that limit the power that the
National Assembly currently has. This wouldn't be a new trick: In 2008,
the opposition politician Antonio Ledezma won the mayoral race in the
capital of Caracas; soon after the election, President Chaveztransferred
the budget and the authority of the post to a new entity under his
control. Later on, Maduro, as president, had Ledezma arrested and added
to the ranks of the regime's many political prisoners. In short, losing
the election but manipulating the instituional rules to evade the checks
and balances that normally result from such an outcome is a very
appealing option for the governing party. Which ot he scenarios actually
obtains hinges on how wide is the margin of difference in votes and
elected deputies between the opposition and the regime. The opposition
needs to achieve a substantial win in order for the government to
concede that it lost the majority.

But, regardless of the outcome, the Venezuelan case demonstrates that
democracy is not defined by what happens on Election Day, but rather by
how the government behaves in between elections. A tyranny continues to
be a tyranny despite holding elections--even if it allows itself to
occasionally lose them.

Source: The Story Behind the Venezuelan Elections | Moisés Naím -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/moises-naim/the-story-behind-venezuelan-elections_b_8728902.html