“Calling this an election,” Garry Kasparov wrote before Vladimir Putin’s “reelection” two months ago, “soils the meaning of a word that should be treasured.” The noun “election,” he contended, doesn’t just signify people voting. It assumes an electoral outcome that’s not guaranteed by a dictator’s will to power. “Yet the media of the free world persist in referring to ‘elections’ in dictatorships like Putin’s Russia because they have no vocabulary to call it anything else—a predicament undemocratic regimes exploit very well.”
For days, accordingly, American and European media have told us about Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro “seeking reelection” and being “favored to win” another six-year term. But this was not an election. As with Putin’s victory in March, Maduro’s wasn’t a “reelection” but a publicity stunt designed to divert attention from his regime’s crimes and bolster his legitimacy in the eyes of Western democracies.
The truth is this: If Maduro faced a real election, he would almost certainly lose. Independent polls of Venezuelans tell us that about three quarters of the country’s 15 million registered voters oppose the country’s Chavista government. The great majority of those who oppose Maduro, however—probably 80 percent—rightly refused to participate in Sunday’s event on the grounds that the government had ensured the outcome. Maduro’s opposition has a hard time agreeing about anything—that, indeed, is one of the country’s great problems—but on this they were united: This “election” is no such thing. The country’s chief opposition candidates, therefore, Henri Falcón and Javier Bertucci, were hopelessly unlikely to amass anything resembling the number of votes secured, illegally or otherwise, by Maduro.
Venezuelan government forces engineer these sham elections in the ways dictatorships always do: They threaten and intimidate voters, they refuse to allow independent vote-counting and lie about the results, and they use formerly legitimate election agencies to maximize their advantage. So for instance the National Electoral Council, or CNE, whose job it is to ensure fair elections, is packed with Maduro sympathizers; the agency routinely postpones or accelerates election dates according to the ruling party’s needs. Opposition leaders are bullied, their followers threatened or worse, and precincts likely to support opposition candidates are mysteriously shut down or required to meet impossible demands.
Initial estimates suggest voter turnout was extremely low, so much so that the regime decreed that polls should remain open past the ordinary time. Official results weren’t available on Sunday night, but those were worthless anyway. Maduro “wins.”
Nothing about this faux-election changes reality for Venezuelans. The Maduro government is broke. Venezuelans are starving. The country’s infrastructure is a total wreck. Its economy is in ruins, and the few private companies that remain are likely to be nationalized by a regime emboldened from its sham election victory. What can the United States do? Last year the Trump administration barred American banks from financing Venezuelan debt, but this alone will not bring the regime to its well-deserved end. With the price of oil rising, Maduro’s government can probably depend on enough revenue to hold on to power.
As we argued five months ago, there is one U.S. policy that will bring about a swift end to the Maduro government: an oil embargo. Policymakers in Washington talk fancifully of sanctioning Venezuela’s oil industry, but it is a long way from reality. Until it happens, the Chavistas survive—and Venezuela’s nightmare continues.
