The victory of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela’s recent presidential election is an indicator of the momentum of the Bolivarian revolution, particularly its anti-imperialist impetus.
This is evident from Maduro’s margin of victory over his nearest political opponent, Henri Falcón, amid widespread social crises that the enemies of Chavismo have been fomenting to overthrow the Maduro government. Despite the multipronged war that the right-wing elite has unleashed against the poor majority, more than 6,2 million Venezuelans voted for Maduro’s re-election compared to 1,9 million votes that were cast for Falcón (and his party known as Progressive Advance)! Another right-wing candidate, Javier Bertucci, an evangelical priest, won roughly 925 000 votes.
The main inference from a simple tally of votes is straightforward: even a Falcón-Bertucci electoral coalition would not have secured a victory for the opposition because the sum total of their combined votes was less than 50% of what Maduro obtained. More importantly, voter trends in terms of social class matched the polarisation of previous elections. Unsurprisingly, Maduro attracted votes from the poor in the urban settlements and peasants in the countryside, whereas the middle class voted for the opposition.
While this electoral outcome paves the way for faster progress in the ‘Bolivarian movement for 21st century socialism’, as envisioned by the late Hugo Chavez, the electoral results also expose major contradictions that any anti-capitalist activist can neither overlook nor simply dismiss.
During the election campaign, for instance, Maduro had hoped to secure roughly 12 million votes for the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV). At that time, this optimism was consistent with the 20,5 million registered voters (the outcome of a roughly 8% growth in registered voters) and historical participation rates hovering around 80%. However, in the May 2018 electoral cycle, actual voter turnout fell short of the anticipated numbers by a huge margin as slightly more than 9,3 million voters, or 46% of registered voters, cast their ballots for the three presidential contestants. This rate of abstention (54%) is unprecedented in the era of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution and was mainly a consequence of the boycott campaign that factions of the opposition have orchestrated since the 2017 Constituent Assembly elections.
The boycott campaign of the opposition, however, has exposed deep fissures and gaping divisions among right-wing forces with the hard-core MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) factions chiding Falcon and Bertucci for lending legitimacy to a ‘corrupt and authoritarian dictatorship’. Furthermore, large sections of the middle class and skilled workers have emigrated. Guesstimates suggest that Venezuelans living abroad account for roughly 3,5 million registered voters but almost all of them, except for an insignificant fraction, joined the boycott campaign.
Falcón campaigned on a typical neoliberal programme, with a former Wall Street banker advising him on economic affairs. Dollarisation, the centrepiece of his programme against hyperinflation, is more than just a switch from the bolívar to the US dollar as the new currency. If Venezuela adopts the US dollar then all its economic policies will be subject to the dictates of the US Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This policy against Venezuela’s economic sovereignty further prescribes radical austerity in the national budget (The Economist, 17 May 2018) which in effect means dismantling the social missions (in health care, education, food distribution, etc.) that have been the bedrock of the Bolivarian revolution.
Shortly after the Electoral Council and foreign observers announced the verified election results, declaring it a fair contest free of vote rigging, the defeated right-wing candidates refused to accept the results. They emphatically rejected it, asserting that it was a fraudulent election. The Trump administration and Washington’s allies in Latin America echoed this right-wing chorus, with the US Secretary of State tweeting “Sham elections change nothing…”
Imperialism is trying to ruthlessly strangle the economy of Venezuela through the new round of financial sanctions that America imposed on 21 May and thus force it to submit to its dictates. As the Financial Times reported: “Caracas is in partial default of its $70bn of traded debt, and oil production, the lifeline of the economy, has dropped to the levels not seen in more than half a century. Foreign companies such as ConocoPhilips of the US are moving aggressively to reclaim money they are owed by the regime. So are the defaulted bondholders.” (Financial Times, 19 May 2018) Clearly, as the political representatives of multinational corporations, the brutality of the American government knows no bounds when it comes to guarding the interests of these corporations.
In the meanwhile, imperialist states have amplified their warmongering and drumbeat of regime change to a deafening pitch. According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, ‘Trump reportedly took his top officials by surprise in an Oval Office meeting (around August 2017), asking why the US could not intervene to remove the government of Nicolás Maduro on the grounds that Venezuela’s political and economic unraveling represented a threat to the region’. (The Guardian, 5 July 2018) Foreign military invasion or a coup engineered through a wing of the armed forces is high on the agenda of the opposition after their resounding defeat in the presidential elections.
The 2018 election has unmasked, once again, the profound turmoil and dilemmas of Venezuela’s splintered right-wing forces in their quest to seize political power with the unbridled backing of imperialism. Maduro’s re-election also demonstrates the deep-rootedness of anti-imperialist convictions of the masses who ultimately constitute the indefatigable defenders of the gains of the unfolding Bolivarian revolution.