By Andreas Bülow
Venezuelans will head to the polls on Sunday, July the 28, in presidential elections. While incumbent president Nicolás Maduro seeks reelection, he is opposed by a right-wing candidate, Edmundo González, who has the support of the USA and large parts of the local capitalist opposition.
The elections are completely different from previous elections in one crucial aspect: while the majority of Venezuela’s opposition has boycotted the last ones (including the 2018 presidential elections), this time they have done everything to mobilise their supporters around one candidate.
Since 2021, Venezuela has witnessed economic growth. According to IMF figures, the economy grew with around 4% in 2023 and the previous year, it was 8%. The recovery is especially influenced by high global energy prices which benefit Venezuela as a large oil-exporting nation. In 2024, the IMF predicts that the Venezuelan GDP see another 4% growth.
In spite of this recovery, the present Venezuelan economy is estimated to be a mere 30% of what it was before the political crisis which started in 2014. A historic depression began when oil prices dropped to the bottom. At the same time, the United States began a programme of sanctions, the first in 2015, had mainly a symbolic character, but later on, in 2017, sanctions were imposed that severely restricted Venezuela’s financial capabilities to restructure loans. Then, crucially, in 2019, we saw an all-out trade embargo, and also the confiscation of a mayor part of Venezuela’s foreign assets.
Some sectors of the capitalist class participated in economic sabotage
There were several other factors that contributed to the crisis. The Chávez government had for years tried to build a mixed economy in collaboration with parts of Venezuela’s capitalist class and was therefore to a certain extend dependant on it. But the capitalists carried out an investment strike and some sectors participated in economic sabotage, with hoarding of products and even smugglig of gasoline and other goods out of the country.
This was not the root of the crisis, but it played a role in aggravating it. Furthermore, corruption and mismanagement in state-owned companies also contributed, as did the lack of long-term government action to ease the dependancy on oil exports. All in all, there was a ’perfect storm’ with a historic depression and destruction of the economy, which saw many people, especially youth, abandon the country.
But beginning in 2021, the economy began a recovery, albeit very fragile. While oil production was at a record low and American sanctions were at their worst, exports were 350,000 barrels per day. That was in 2020. But today Venezuela exports 851,000 barrels, according to OPEC. However, the part of the economy outside of oil has not grown significantly. Therefore, the upswing is very much dependent on Chinese imports and the world market in general, while the upholding, or not, of US sanctions also plays a certain role.
From coup attempts to negotiations
In early 2019, the United States attempted a direct and undisguised coup to overthrow Nicolás Maduro. Juan Guaidó, the opposition’s relatively unknown Speaker of the parliament, proclaimed himself president with the support of the USA and the European Union, even though he did not possess even a shred of real power.
Although he attempted both a direct military uprising (in April 2019) and later gave tentative support to a paramilitary invasion (May 2020), it all failed. In 2022, he left Venezuela, for Colombia, from where the new Petro government threw him out, after which he went to the United States and is now in exile. He is generally a forgotten figure in the media, both outside and inside Venezuela’s borders, a symbol of an utterly failed policy on part of the Americans.
After the outbreak of the Ukraine war in 2022, the United States imposed, where they could, an embargo on Russian oil. Therefore, they suddenly had some short-term need for oil supplies, and that forced them into negotiations with Maduro – whom they had until then denied was even a legitimate president!
This meant that the US slowly began to put some of the sanctions ’on hold’ and trade with Venezuela was partially opened up. A series of negotiations took place between the United States and Venezuela, as well as with the local pro-American opposition, first in Mexico, then in Barbados and in Qatar.
The negotiations led to the Venezuelan government releasing some prisoners, including those Americans implicated in the paramilitary invasion of 2020, as well as others, such as a former intelligence officer, Miguel Rodríguez Torres. Conversely, the US agreed to ease the sanctions, but only step by step. At the same time, the United States demanded that the candidates of the right-wing opposition should be able to participate, without restrictions, in the presidential elections of 2024.
After the failure of Juan Guaidó, the United States had begun to look more towards that part of the opposition led by Henrique Capriles Radonski, a former governor of the state of Miranda, who has also participated in a number of coup attempts, but who since 2020 has followed a more moderate tactic. It was, largely, this sector that dominated the opposition’s negotiating delegation in Barbados in August-September 2023. But just one month later, in October 2023, the most extreme part of the opposition, around Maria Corina Machado, won a huge victory in the opposition’s primary election to find a presidential candidate.
But Corina Machado was shortly afterwards notified by Venezuela’s Electoral Council CNE that she had a political ban on participating in elections, something which she had had for a number of years before that. After she appealed the decision, the Supreme Court chose to uphold it.
The USA and the EU have used that situation as a reason to question the election even before the result is available. They have also used it as an excuse to reimpose sanctions on Venezuela, beginning in April 2024. However, at the beginning of July, Maduro said that he has now restarted negotiations with the United States. What impact this will have remains to be seen.
The opposition’s stand-in candidate
Maria Corina Machado is not a new nor unknown politician. Back in April 2002, she supported the short-lived coup d’état against Hugo Chávez, and signed coup-president Pedro Carmona’s decree, which was only stopped when a massive popular and military movement overthrew the coup. She then built an opposition NGO called Súmate, which received over 3 million dollars in support from the United States through their NED-program. In 2005, then-President George W Bush welcomed her to the White House for in-depth talks on “democracy in Venezuela”.
After Chávez’s death in 2013, Machado took part in a violent uprising in 2014, which became known as “la salida” (the exit) and which had the proclaimed goal of forcing immediate regime change. Throughout the 2019 crisis, Machado also chose to support the harsh US sanctions against Venezuela and even advocated direct foreign military intervention in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan authorities thus had real arguments to initiate an open trial against Machado, based on her publicly-known participation in various coup attempts. Instead, the process was delayed and ended up with an administrative ban on her participation as a candidate in election processes. Unfortunately, this shows that the Maduro government largely uses the judiciary arbitrarily, at will, and uses administrative means instead of a clear political struggle.
After it became clear that the Supreme Court upheld the decision to exclude Machado as a candidate, she, and most of the opposition, chose to unite around Edmundo González, a 74-year-old former diplomat. He is considered to be a proxy candidate for Machado, who is actually running the entire campaign with rallies and demonstrations.
Their campaign has the goal of regime change, but also a restructuring agreement with the IMF, an acceleration of privatizations, plans to shrink the public sector through mass layoffs, a submission to American imperialism, and a showdown with all the symbolic remnants of the Bolivarian revolution.
The working class is paying for the crisis
In the past six years, Nicolás Maduro’s government has turned to the right in crucial areas. Special economic zones have been introduced to attract foreign investors. Agreements have been canceled by a special decree, the infamous Memorandum 2792. Wages have been frozen. Public expenditure has been shrunk. A number of companies that were previously state-owned have been privatized through shady processes, two examples being the supermarket chain Abastos Bicentenario and the fertilizer manufacturer AgroPatria.
At the same time, inequality has increased enormously, with some parts of the state bureaucracy (the so-called “nuevos ricos”, the new rich) luxuriating in business and exorbitant corruption. It even became too much for the Maduro government itself, which in 2023 and 2024 imprisoned a number of ex-ministers and officials in a group around Tareck El-Aissami, a former vice president, who had stolen billions of dollars in what was called the PDVSA-crypto scandal.
Foreign companies, especially Turkish, Iranian, Chinese and Russian capital, have been granted favourable licenses for the oil trade. In the state of Bolívar, the government has also opened up foreign mining in the large project Arco Minero. The conditions of public servants have been degraded through a decree from ONAPRE, the national budget office.
The working class has paid for the crisis
Common to all this policy is that the government has let the working class pay the price for the crisis. While Venezuela now stands for the third year in a row with positive GDP growth, workers have not seen any corresponding restoration of the minimum wage. On the contrary, wages have been frozen over a longer period, while inflation remains high (in 2023 it was at 189%, which is high, albeit lower than other years in Venezuela). According to figures from Ecoanalitica from May this year, 65% of the population earns just 100 dollars a month.
That situation has led to a long series of strikes and the intensification of the class struggle. At the beginning of 2023, there were strikes in almost all of Venezuela’s 24 states, led by the school teachers.
In order to curb this movement, the Maduro government chose to step up the persecution of trade union activists, who in many cases have been imprisoned. The latest examples of this are Daniel Romero from the steel rolling mill Sidor and, before him, the shop steward Jean Mendoza from Masisa. In addition, on May 1, the International Day of Workers’ Struggle, an independent trade union demonstration was attacked in Caracas by motorcyclists hired by the government.
The Communist Party excluded from standing in elections
Also on the political front, the government has increasingly used bureaucratic manoeuvres. In 2021, a regional election in Barinas state was suddenly suspended because a ‘wrong’ candidate had won. In a by-election, the opposition then won again, which showed that the manoeuvre was a gigantic mistake by the government.
A large part of the bureaucratic manoeuvres have been designed to censor criticism from the left. Already in 2020, we saw how the government arbitrarily intervened in independent left-wing parties, PPT (Patria Para Todos, Fatherland for All) and Tupamaros, to deprive them of their legal status and thus their formal right to stand for elections.
At that time, a number of left-wing organizations chose to found an electoral alliance, APR (Alternativa Popular Revolucionaria, the People’s Revolutionary Alternative), which used the electoral register of the Communist Party (PCV) to stand in the parliamentary elections in December 2020. As we described at the time, the APR won then about 2.7% of the vote, and got a single seat in parliament.
But subsequently the government mobilised its entire apparatus to stop the last independent electoral list to its left. Thus the government allied itself with a group of former PCV members who suddenly claimed that they were holding a “congress” against the democratically elected leadership.
Then the Electoral Council CNE (Consejo Nacional Electoral) – and the Supreme Court – agreed that these individuals should take over the Communist Party’s legal register and could use it to NOT run independently in elections, directly against the party’s democratic decisions. In other words, the government has hijacked the PCV’s electoral register.
By this extremely undemocratic approach the government has excluded criticism from the left. Unfortunately, this development has also led to the disintegration of the APR, which was a modest, yet important rallying point for the left. The PCV scandalously decided to recommend an independent capitalist candidate, Enrique Marquéz, who has been a supporter of the opposition for years, and who today speaks of class reconciliation as his main slogan.
This development has weakened the PCV’s credibility in the eyes of many activists in the movement in Venezuela. On the other hand, the PPT has chosen not to recommend any candidates in the presidential election
Perspectives for the election are uncertain, but contradictions mount up
It is impossible to predict exactly what will happen in the election. The situation in Venezuela right now is like the calm before the storm, with rumors and speculation flying around. Opinion polls show very different forecasts, with some predicting a large majority for Gonzalez, while others have Maduro at the top. There is enormous dissatisfaction with the current situation, but it is also true that the government still has a ‘hard core’ of supporters which is probably between 2-3 million people.
In the last presidential election, in 2018, there was a significant loss of votes on the right wing, where, among other things, the evangelical pastor, Bertucci, got about 10% of the votes that were lost. He is standing again, as is the veteran Claudio Fermín, both of whom can draw significant numbers of votes away from the main right-wing candidate, Edmundo González.
Conversely, a similar wastage of votes does not exist on the left, because the government has manoeuvred to shut down all electoral lists to its left. In addition, a number of restrictions have made it difficult for the between 3-5 million eligible Venezuelans living abroad to vote, a fact that will probably also favour the government.
If Maduro wins by a narrow margin, as a recently leaked report from polling firm Datanalisis suggests, it is unlikely to be accepted by Maria Corina Machado and the United States. They will probably start new riots. The Americans will press, both rhetorically and with sanctions, while Machado will appeal to Trump and the Republicans in particular, to make it a sub-theme in the American election campaign.
There is also speculation about whether Maduro will voluntarily hand over power if he loses, or whether we will see a ‘negotiated transition’ like in Nicaragua in the 1990s, when the Sandinistas entered into negotiations with Violeta Chamorra on a series of initiatives that allowed them to still hold on to some of power, for example the Ministry of Defence.
Sections of the government bureaucracy have an interest in staying put
It should be noted that whoever is elected president will not be installed until January 2025, so there is half a year for any negotiations on a transition. Huge interests are at stake, because sections of the government bureaucracy – and the army – have built up big business ventures and stand not only to lose them, but also to be persecuted if they lose power. If Edmundo González wins, the contradictions between those who want a negotiated transition and the radical opposition, driven by revenge, will also come to the surface.
In addition, it must be mentioned that there are still parts of the activists in the Bolivarian movement, Chavismo, who, despite the government’s significant shift to the right, continue to see it as a bulwark against imperialism and they fear a future with Machado in the Miraflores Presidential Palace.
While there is huge disillusionment with the government, there is also scepticism about the opposition, not least because of their history of violent coup attempts and support for foreign invasions and sanctions, something that in previous elections has kept many from voting for them, although it is difficult to predict how big an effect it will have this time.
The only thing that is certain now is that we are facing a turbulent situation in Venezuela in which economic and political contradictions are enormously sharpened. In such a situation, a new revolutionary movement can also be born – out of the independent trade unions, the peasant movement in the countryside, the youth in the slums in the big cities and those parts of Chavismo who want an alternative to the current situation.
Top picture of Maduro from Wikimedia Commons, here.
