Venezuela’s Strongman Maduro Could Actually Lose

“I’m here for the change,” said Erikson Pacheco, a motorcycle delivery man attending a campaign event in La Victoria, a small town west of Venezuela’s capital of Caracas, on May 18. On the stage stood María Corina Machado, the center-right leader of Venezuela’s opposition, who is banned from running for office by the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro. Beside her was her proxy candidate: Edmundo González Urrutia, a low-profile former ambassador to Algeria and Argentina who was hardly known in Venezuela until April.

“I’ve never been to a rally before,” Pacheco said. “I voted for Maduro. I didn’t like María Corina. Now I like her—a lot.” Pacheco’s sentiment points to a major political shift, as Venezuelans who once backed Maduro’s socialist government are now rallying behind a big-tent opposition led by a politician who styles herself as a kind of Venezuelan Margaret Thatcher.

Against all odds, the opposition is gaining momentum ahead of the July 28 presidential elections. In recent months, Machado has been holding mass rallies in rural towns that were once strongholds of Venezuela’s ruling Chavistas, the followers of the late socialist President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro. The opposition now has a real chance of winning: González Urrutia is polling around 50 to 60 percent, compared with Maduro’s 10 to 30 percent.

Still, Maduro’s government has a history of manipulating the vote, so victory is not assured.

Just a few months ago, the opposition’s rise seemed unlikely. The mainstream opposition hasn’t participated in a Venezuelan presidential election since 2013, when Maduro took office after Chávez’s death. In recent years, Maduro has maintained his grip on power by deepening repression. His regime has detained hundreds of opposition activists, heightened censorship, held sham elections, banned popular candidates from running for office, and tightened its control over public and private institutions. But now, despite the regime’s attempts to sway the election, many Venezuelans and international actors are preparing for a possible democratic transition.

This election cycle, the opposition—supported by members of the international community—has been able to demand fairer elections due to changing political conditions in a battered Venezuela.

Over the past few years, the country has experienced a humanitarian emergency amid what is arguably the world’s worst economic collapse outside of a war zone. The crisis has destroyed basic public services and led nearly 8 million Venezuelans to flee the country over the past decade, many of them to Colombia. In October, Caracas reached an agreement with the U.S.-backed mainstream opposition to ensure free and fair elections in exchange for sanctions relief from Washington. (The United States has since reimposed sanctions on Venezuela for failing to uphold parts of the agreement.)

Nearly 2.5 million Venezuelans voted in the October opposition primaries, organized by civil society, in which Machado, a former lawmaker, won more than 92 percent of the vote. It was a clear sign that Venezuelans had become more politically active after years of disenchantment. In particular, rural and low-income Venezuelans—bases that the Chavistas traditionally relied on—have embraced the Machado-led opposition.

“Around 75 percent of the country consistently says it wants a political change and a change of government on July 28,” said Luis Vidal, the director of Venezuela-based pollster More Consulting.

Now, the opposition has rallied behind González Urrutia to lead its Unitary Platform coalition. Initially, the soft-spoken 74-year-old was a placeholder candidate. The mainstream opposition registered him in order to meet a deadline to formalize a candidate after the regime prevented Machado’s original choice for a proxy, Corina Yoris, from registering in March. But since then, the diverse opposition forces have unanimously decided to continue backing González Urrutia’s candidacy.

González Urrutia, who is campaigning under the slogan “the president for all,” has the support of Machado’s Vente Venezuela party and the 10 parties that make up the Unitary Platform, as well as minor parties that include dissident Chavistas, democratic socialists, and Marxist-Leninists. In his speeches, he focuses on reconciliation and civility to resolve decades of conflict and polarization.

According to Guillermo Tell Aveledo, a political scientist who helped organized the opposition primaries, González Urrutia’s candidacy is a remarkable achievement for an opposition that has “followed the electoral norms within the rules of the current [Chavista-controlled] institutions with a lot of caution.”

Despite this momentum, the opposition faces significant challenges over the next few weeks. Analysts warn that the Maduro regime could still draw from a well of more extreme tactics before the elections. For instance, it could ban González Urrutia from running, move the elections to a future date, or suspend them altogether by instigating an armed conflict with Guyana over the contested Esequibo region—an oil- and mineral-rich part of Guyana’s sovereign territory that Venezuela has long asserted claims over despite international court rulings to the contrary. (In recent months, Venezuela has built a bridge near the border, held military maneuvers called “El Esequibo is Ours,” and deployed at least three Peykaap missile boats near the territory.)

But the more likely threat will come on election day. Observers have described this election’s conditions as some of Venezuela’s worst in the past 25 years. The National Electoral Council (CNE), which organizes the elections and announces the results, is dominated by Chavistas, and many opposition parties are barred from the ballot. After the sanctions relief deal with the United States was announced in October, the Maduro regime did extend invitations to electoral observation missions from the Carter Center, European Union, and the United Nations, but it has since disinvited the EU. (For now, the Carter Center and U.N. will still be sending observers.)

The opposition is hoping for a landslide victory, which would reduce the possibility that voting fraud could sway the election. But it also knows that it must continue organizing to ensure that elections are as free and fair as possible, even as the campaign’s main organizers are taking refuge in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas after the government ordered their arrests in March.

Machado has promoted the creation of comanditos, or grassroots community groups, to mobilize and organize voters. According to the opposition’s registry, more than 50,000 comanditos have formed across the country. The opposition campaign has also promoted a plan to install 600,000 volunteer polling station witnesses throughout the country to oversee the vote. According to Machado, the opposition already has 98 percent of the polling station witnesses it needs.

Still, opposition supporters will likely face harassment and even violence from Chavista sympathizers in many areas, which could scare off witnesses in voting centers.

“The problem is not the opposition’s readiness, but the limits imposed by the government,” said Aveledo, the political scientist.

Nevertheless, even Venezuela’s private television channels, which usually face strict censorship, are starting to cover Machado’s rallies and government crackdowns on activists and civilians who provide services to the campaign. The government detained more than 70 people linked to the opposition over just 10 days in early July.

But Maduro is also facing considerable international pressure. In April, the United States reimposed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry due to the regime’s failure to significantly improve electoral conditions. Maduro accepted a proposal to resume direct talks with Washington earlier this month. His regime is also facing public criticism from its close leftist allies in Colombia and Brazil. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has described the ban on Machado’s candidacy as “an anti-democratic coup,” while Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose party previously supported Maduro, has expressed concern over Yoris’s disqualification, saying that “it is serious that the candidate could not be registered.”

Petro, who is serving as a mediator in Venezuela’s political crisis, has proposed that Venezuela cement an agreement that would “guarantee to whoever loses the security of their life, [and] their political rights.” This has opened a discussion on political guarantees and amnesty in any post-Maduro Venezuela. Any such process will be difficult, especially because Maduro’s regime—which a U.N. fact-finding mission has accused of widespread human rights violations—is being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

“A dialogue between Venezuelans can also include the government—even more so if we are seeking reunification and peace in the country,” said González Urrutia when we spoke at his home in the hills of southeastern Caracas in early May. He noted that he has teams working on transitional justice proposals.

Paola Bautista de Alemán, a political scientist and the vice president of Primero Justicia, an opposition party that is part of the Unitary Platform coalition, believes that the international community should support and facilitate a new national pact to move forward: “But not as its creators,” she said. “The agreements must be created and subscribed to by those that represent the Venezuelan people’s will: Venezuelans themselves.”

For Rafael Uzcátegui, the co-director of the Caracas-based think tank Laboratorio de Paz, any discussion of transitional guarantees regarding human rights violations and crimes against humanity “must include victims, in all their diversity, and the human rights organizations and activists.” Still, Uzcátegui said, a transition must also ensure “freedom of association, protest, and expression” to the multiple branches of Chavistas and due process to officials accused of human rights violations.

For now, at least, those considerations are taking a backseat to the more pressing concerns of election day. Although hurdles to a regime change abound, many Venezuelans who want an end to the Maduro regime remain optimistic.

“Venezuelan society has shown an extraordinary resilience and a desire for freedom.” Bautista de Alemán said. “You can see it in political organizations and in civil society and”—as those rallies for the opposition have made clear—“in the streets.”