Michael Paarlberg is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Follow him on X: @MPaarlberg
Voters in Venezuela were greeted at midnight Sunday with the least surprising outcome to the latest in a string of dubious elections: the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro was declared winner in a race that he was projected to lose in a landslide. The state election body, the CNE (Consejo Nacional Electoral), did not produce the evidence which they are required by law to post under an electoral system set up by Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez – the actas, or printed vote tallies. Instead, the CNE simply announced Maduro the winner. Give the regime credit, at least, for declaring he won with just 51% of the vote, rather than 80 or 90%; officials clearly thought they were being subtle.
Since Sunday, the opposition – the coalition of Maduro’s opponent and likely winner, Edmundo González, and led by banned candidate María Corina Machado – announced that they have collected 73% of the vote tallies, which show González winning by a 70-30 margin. This is consistent with pre-election polls that showed him leading Maduro by at least a 35 point margin, and exit polls on Sunday showing a similar blowout. Polls are not always correct, and have been hampered in recent years by nonresponse bias – the tendency of voters on one side or another to be more likely to refuse to answer polls. In an authoritarian context like Venezuela’s however, nonresponse would actually underestimate the opposition’s support. But with nearly three-quarters of vote tallies collected as of the time of writing, the margins reported make it mathematically impossible for Maduro to have won.
As testified by the Carter Center, which has monitored Venezuelan elections since 1998, the fault lies not with the Venezuelan people, polling staff, party witnesses, or citizen observers, all of whom contributed to a fair election. “However,” the Center declared in a statement, “their efforts were undermined by the CNE’s complete lack of transparency in announcing the results.”
Thus it is clear that Maduro stole the election. The question remains what happens next. Events on the ground are moving fast, with mass protests breaking out throughout the country. This, too, is unsurprising, and a scenario for which the regime had clearly prepared. In the run-up to the election, Maduro had bolstered his standing with the military to ensure their loyalty in the face of inevitable unrest and warned of a “bloodbath.” It has been the government’s response to those protests that has made this bloodbath a reality; as of the time of this writing, at least 20 protesters have been killed and over 700 jailed. Venezuela’s political future is being decided on the streets, but at the moment, the government and its security forces – both police and paramilitary colectivos – have the upper hand.
Lessons for the US
That Maduro would not accept the results of the election was always a highly likely outcome. None should be less prepared for this than the US government, the longtime antagonist to the chavista regime. Successive administrations, Democrats and Republicans, have been open about their desire for regime change, though not necessarily an Iraq-style approach. In 2019, the US and much of the rest of the world recognized a shadow presidency of Juan Guaidó, who never consolidated domestic support nor threatened Maduro’s grip on power. Trump hinted at military action before losing interest and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, crippling the economy and contributing to the migrant exodus.
Biden pushed hard for a negotiated settlement under which the regime agreed to hold elections in exchange for a gradual lifting of the Trump-era sectoral sanctions, resulting in 2023’s Barbados Agreement. The July election was thus a major Biden foreign policy objective, one that was hoped to lower both oil prices and migration flows – an incredible 7.7 million Venezuelans, 20% percent of the population, have left the country in the past decade – ahead of the US election in November. Had it resulted in a peaceful transfer of power, it would be a crowning achievement. That it did not should have been anticipated, with contingency plans in place to protect those now being targeted by the regime.
What went wrong? Diplomacy is fundamentally about meeting the leaders of nations where they are, but that must be the starting point, not the end, and Maduro’s declaration of victory despite evidence to the contrary violates the existing agreement. As a result, the Biden administration appears naïve, or at least too eager to reach a deal to curb migration and inflation with a strongman who never intended to bargain in good faith. To confront this blatant theft and state violence, the US and the world community need to have a smarter strategy. The condition for noncompliance with the Barbados Agreement, a clawback to status quo ante sanctions, is no disincentive to a regime that has weathered them so far.
Venezuelan civil society needs to call the shots, and be empowered to negotiate an end to an untenable situation that even the regime knows cannot last forever.
One way out of the present crisis would be a negotiated exit using both carrots and sticks, which would require giving Maduro and his cronies and the generals who really decide his fate, immunity from prosecution for their many crimes against the Venezuelan people and considerable corruption – a deal that was similarly unsatisfying but successful in hastening the exit of right-wing dictatorships in the 1980s. This seems unlikely. With multiple indictments against him in US courts, and Republicans calling for Maduro to serve prison time, he is making the same calculation as other dictators with their backs to the wall: to spill as much blood as necessary to stay in power.
This is not to say sanctions relief was a mistake. Broad-based sanctions have done nothing to dislodge Maduro; rather, they have exacerbated the suffering of ordinary Venezuelans while government elites remained insulated. Targeted relief aimed at improving the lives of everyday Venezuelans is both humane and strategic: it is one of the best ways to reduce irregular migration while empowering Venezuelan civil society. Free and fair elections are vital, but making them the condition for targeted relief hurts as much as helps. Ultimately, Venezuelan civil society, not the US, China or Russia, needs to call the shots, and be empowered to negotiate an end to an untenable situation that even the regime knows cannot last forever.
Lessons for progressives
For an uncomfortably long time, criticism of Venezuela’s chavista regime has been taboo for the global left. In large part a legacy of Chávez’s personal charisma and eagerness to confront the US at a low point in its global reputation – the Iraq War – and partly also due to Venezuela’s financial largesse at a time when its treasury was overflowing under a global oil price boom, many center- to far-left parties reflexively defended Maduro even as he tanked the economy and ramped up repression.
This residual support is fading. Venezuela’s longtime allies such as Brazil’s Lula and Colombia’s Petro have voiced skepticism about Maduro’s purported victory, demanding to see the vote tallies. Other, newer leaders of Latin America’s left, Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Guatemala’s Bernardo Arévalo, have been more forceful in their criticisms. The Maduro regime has reacted by expelling diplomats of critical countries, left or right, an unprecedented move signaling its growing self-isolation. The few countries to unquestionably accept the cooked results have been Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and outside the region, Russia, Iran and China. The divides don’t line up neatly by ideology, unless one considers Putin to be a better arbiter of the progressive position than Boric. Even Venezuela’s Communist Party is in opposition to the Maduro regime, in stark contrast to left parties in other countries who lazily view the world through a campist lens.
If the global left seeks to show solidarity with the Venezuelan people, it should listen to voices within civil society rather than the regime: NGOs, human rights advocates, labor unions, and groups like the Foro Cívico that have articulated reforms necessary for true representation. And if the left seeks to play the long game and cares about its prospects in the future, it should recognize the Maduro regime for what it is: the worst model of the left with which to be associated. Throughout Latin America, far right candidates win office by running against the chavista bogeyman, and for millions of voters, “socialism” means what it means in Venezuela: authoritarianism, state terror, hunger and insecurity. The 7-plus million Venezuelans who have fled the country bring with them stories of what made them leave, and as this crisis escalates, more will follow. At the same time, it is a model other strongmen (not on the left) find useful. Even Trump praised Maduro for supposedly lowering Venezuela’s crime rate, and according to his former national security advisor, privately expressed admiration for Maduro for being “too smart and too tough” to be overthrown, as well as for “all those good-looking generals” who stood beside him. Should Maduro succeed in crushing the protests, it would likely only make those in the global authoritarian axis admire him more.
EDITOR’S NOTE: you can watch Paarlberg discuss Venezuela’s election, and the reaction to it, with CIP fellow María José Espinosa and Executive Vice President Matt Duss.
