Maduro's legitimacy plunges into crisis following election

Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro went to presidential elections on Sunday with the hope of gaining the legitimacy he lacked from the widely questioned 2018 presidential elections.

Instead, his regime is receiving perhaps its deepest challenge yet, as the victory announced by the electoral authority has been questioned nationally and internationally.

Turnout seems to have been massive on Sunday with an estimated participation of 63% or 80%. It’s hard to actually know, given that over 20% of the population has emigrated in recent years, rendering any calculation difficult based on an outdated electoral registry. The turnout, as well as a number of exit polls that were circulating on social media, raised expectations of a significant win for opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, supported by the opposition’s leader, María Corina Machado.

However, when the National Electoral Council (CNE) provided results close to midnight Sunday, it showed Maduro with a 51% majority and an “irreversible tendency” based on 80% of the votes having allegedly been counted. This immediately spurred protests given the reports across the country of grave irregularities at the end of the process.

In Venezuela’s system, when the voting ends, the voting machine is finalized and spits out a paper tally of the votes received by that machine. Each party witness is supposed to receive a copy. However, in most cases this did not happen, and the opposition ended up with only 30-40% of the paper tallies.

Furthermore, the CNE did not, and still has not, published the voting data on its webpage, as it is required to do by law.

Shortly afterwards from their campaign headquarters, Machado and Gonzalez charged that the CNE’s results were fraudulent and that the tallies they did have showed that Gonzalez had won handily. They called for people to go to the electoral centers to defend the vote. However, they did not call for street mobilizations, in order to avoid violence which could play into the government’s hands.

What they did do was work with the witnesses of other opposition candidates, to collect as many paper tallies as they could. Based on that work, they announced Monday evening that with 73.3% of the tallies, Edmundo Gonzalez had an irreversible lead of 3.5 million votes.

As early as Sunday night, regional leaders had expressed doubts about the CNE’s results. Chilean President Gabriel Boric set the tone saying on X:

The Maduro Regime should understand that the results it has published are hard to believe. The International community and above all the Venezuelan people, including the millions of Venezuelans in exile, demand complete transparency of the vote tallies and the process, and that the international observers not committed to the government testify to the veracity of the votes

Chile will not recognize any result that is not verifiable.

The situation only became more critical on Monday and Tuesday as more international leaders, many with an institutional or ideological commitment to moderation joined the chorus, including the United Nations Secretary General and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs which has been facilitating negotiations since 2019.

President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated Mexico’s traditional emphasis on non-intervention but said the way to put aside doubts would be the complete transparency of the vote. U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration carefully negotiated sanctions relief in exchange for democratic elections called for the release of detailed voting data, as did the top foreign policy official of the European Union, Josep Borrell

On Tuesday the Carter Center, which brought the most significant international effort at elections monitoring, announced that it was removing all personnel from Venezuela. When it returned to Atlanta, it released a scathing report saying that, from beginning to end, the elections did not meet international standards.

In Washington, the Organization of American States’ election observation department suggested that "The events of election night confirm a coordinated strategy, unfolding over recent months, to undermine the integrity of the electoral process."

The critical positions of Colombia, Brazil are particularly important given that they are border countries and are on the ideological left and exerted an important impact during the electoral campaign with timely statements criticizing aspects of the process. Although they have not yet issued a much anticipated joint statement, there are hopes they still could, and perhaps engage in direct diplomatic engagement with Maduro. Colombian President Gustavo Petro Wednesday called for the release of detailed vote tallies.

On the other side, Russia, China, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras and Cuba congratulated Maduro on his reelection shortly after the CNE announced its results.

The Maduro government itself has responded so far by leaning into the situation, transmitting outrage and pushing forward. Maduro jubilantly and aggressively declared himself Venezuela’s next president. Already on Monday morning, the CNE, still having failed to publish voting data and with its website out of service, held a ceremony proclaiming Maduro’s purported victory.

This proclamation predictably detonated protests across the country as frustrated citizens took to the streets. These protests were quite different from previous anti-Maduro protests that were predominantly mobilized by the middle classes and students. Yesterday it was residents of poor and working class districts of the capital Caracas, such as Caricuao and Petare, who took to the streets. At least 16 people have been killed in clashes across the country since the vote Sunday, reported the rights group Foro Penal and a survey of hospitals, according to the Washington Post. At least 750 people have reportedly been arrested.

The social base of these protests creates difficult optics for Chavismo — the leftist, revolutionary movement begun by the late Hugo Chávez — and for the government’s attempts to portray them as the work of the same violent protesters of 2014 and 2017.

However, it’s not yet clear that the opposition leadership has a strategy to capitalize on citizen outrage. Instead, they have rightfully focused on their demand that the CNE release the voting data as required by law. They also want to avoid easy accusations that they seek to generate violence. Machado called for the convening of citizen assemblies in the middle-class areas of Caracas. But it is not clear this will overcome a long-term class division in opposition mobilization.

The Maduro government responded to international rejection of its election by breaking relations with seven Latin American nations, including Argentina, Panamá, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic, and ordering diplomatic personnel to leave immediately. The most immediate threat of this move is that Machado’s campaign leadership has been operating from the Argentinian Embassy since orders for their arrests were issued in March.

In the past, the Maduro government has successfully neutralized opposition leaders by either arresting them or forcing them into exile through campaigns of harassment. It has tolerated Machado’s campaign and González’s candidacy as part of its search for normalization with the rest of the world and the easing of U.S. and E.U. sanctions. Now that that project seems to be on the rocks, however, the government could well go after them.

Yesterday, President of the National Assembly Jorge Rodriguez said that Machado and Gonzalez were fascist leaders who should be in jail.

For now, the U.S. has reacted with caution. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said “there will be consequences,” but officials have suggested that economic sanctions that were suspended last year in order to encourage the government to conduct a free and fair electoral process will not be immediately restored and that the policy will be reviewed in terms of “overall U.S. national foreign policy interests.”

What seems clear is that with such high exit costs, Nicolás Maduro and his officials have decided it is better to weather the storm than to hand over power, a decision that could generate more instability and suffering.

There have been efforts by the opposition and international stakeholders to negotiate the terms of an orderly transition that would avoid a witch-hunt. It has been the Maduro government that has rejected these efforts in large part because the glue that keeps their coalition together is the idea that the revolution started by Hugo Chávez in 1999 is irreversible.

Considering the possibility that this might not be the case could lead to defections.

However, having sunk to a new low in international and national credibility as a result of Sunday’s election and the way the government has (mis)handled it, perhaps the coalition could be open to renewed efforts at negotiation.