CARACAS, Venezuela — The socialist regime will hold a presidential election sometime during the second half of 2024.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro claims it will be “free and fair” and U.S. President Joe Biden seems to believe him. But those of us who have lived through the entirety of this socialist revolution — soon-to-be 25 years old — we know how this tale ends.
It’s very simple, really. Venezuela’s socialist regime spent the past 25 years consolidating its stranglehold on the country, be it by force or by sham elections. Why would they — after all of their repression, crime, and violence, and with all that’s at stake for them — shoot themselves in the foot and allow themselves to be defeated in an election? They understand how pervasively unpopular Maduro has become and how easily he could be defeated in an actual free and fair election.
This upcoming “free and fair” election, which does not yet have a date, is the flimsy foundation of a series of vague electoral promises the Maduro regime has offered not just the United States but the international community.
In return, the United States generously awarded Maduro with oil and sanctions relief in October — and, most recently, gave him back his top (alleged) money launderer Alex Saab, who was awaiting trial in America. Saab’s liberation feels like an utter slap in the face to Venezuelans who were expecting at least some form of justice to come out of that eventual trial, something we so desperately need after all we’ve been through.
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, laughs as he delivers a State of the Union address at the National Assembly in Caracas, Venezuela, on January 12, 2021. (Carlos Becerra/Bloomberg)
There is a degree of naivety in thinking that Maduro, who clung to power by holding a sham election in 2018 and who just finished executing the most blatantly sham election yet, will play fair in 2024.
The results of a poll released by the Venezuelan firm Meganálisis in November suggest that, under an actual free and fair election, Maduro would suffer an astounding defeat, as only 8.6 percent of respondents expressed their intention to vote for him.
In contrast, María Corina Machado — who leads the country’s only mainstream center-right party, Vente Venezuela — attracted the support of 70.6 percent of the poll’s respondents. That is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she is banned from running for office until at least 2030.
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Machado, while not a “new” face in the Venezuelan political landscape and certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, is the only viable candidate left against Maduro. Every other mainstream politician has either failed, disappointed, or collaborated with the regime. That is why she obtained a landslide victory in the opposition’s self-organized October primary elections — an event that the Maduro regime swiftly “nullified” by a court order.
After initially refusing to do so, Machado appealed her ban at the socialist-controlled courts last week. On December 20, the courts ordered the comptroller general to provide details of the ban to move the case forward. Whether the regime’s courts will play ball and lift her ban or not is something that remains to be seen.
Even if the ban is lifted and Machado is allowed to run, there’s still a lot of road ahead before Venezuelans can say that 2024’s election will be “free and fair.” The regime controls CNE, the country’s electoral authority, and as such it has direct control of Venezuela’s voter registry. Then there is the matter of the voting machines themselves, which are operated by Ex-Cle, an Argentine-based company with deep ties to the Maduro regime and its vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Ex-Cle was sanctioned by the United States for its role in 2020’s sham legislative elections in the country.
President Joe Biden said this week that Maduro, “so far, is keeping his commitment on a free election” and that he has “got a long way to go, but it’s good so far.” I would digress in Biden’s apparent optimism, but he does have a point: there’s a long way to go before we are able to celebrate a free and fair election, I just don’t see that happening next year. For the sake of my country, I do wish to end up being wrong because, as unlikely as it presently seems, I do wish to live long enough to see my country free.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
