For the first time since its election in 2013, the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela looks scared. According to a recent public opinion survey, 66 percent of Venezuelans hope that the July 28 presidential election will bring political change to their country, and opposition candidate Edmundo González leads Maduro in opinion polls by between 20 to 30 percent. Stealing this contest won’t be as easy as it was for Maduro in 2017, 2018, or 2020.
Still, he is trying. With the specter of being turned out of office by a popular vote, the president’s government, and his electoral commission, have been doing everything in their power to throw the election in Maduro’s favor.
International solidarity in defense of democratic norms—and the October 2023 Barbados Agreement, in which Maduro agreed to a set of electoral guarantees—have helped nudge Venezuela to a potential tipping point. For the first time in many years there is a sense of imminent change and hope.
But electoral theft, political upheaval and subterfuge remain possible. There are a number of scenarios: outright theft if current efforts at tilting the playing field in the government’s favor don’t work, a suspension of the election if more subtle measures to get the government close enough fail, or an attempt by the Maduro government to form a coalition government of its choosing, whether it loses or it wins by fraud. As election day approaches, democratic governments in the Americas and Europe need to remain vigilant.
Both opposition groups and the international community have stuck with elections as their goal, and in so doing, have kept the Maduro regime on the back foot. A milestone in this convoluted and frustrating journey to the ballot box was the Barbados Agreement, which in turn can trace its origins to a calibrated process of sanctions relief by the Biden White House in coordination with international partners in Latin America and Europe.
On Oct. 18, the day after the Barbados Agreement was struck, the U.S. announced a liberalization of its sanctions on the Venezuela’s oil and gas sector. The sanctions policy change came with a proviso: if the Maduro government didn’t stick to its commitments in Barbados, sanctions would “snap back.”
As promised, six months later the White House reviewed whether the Maduro government had complied. It hadn’t, so the Biden administration recalibrated its sanctions opening, requiring beneficiary investors to apply individually to continue operation, with those licenses to be evaluated regularly based on the government’s respect for elections and human rights.
The Bolivarian regime in Caracas reacted predictably—with manufactured indignation and outrage, used to justify a subsequent breaking of election rights. In reality, though, the White House’s sanctions snap back was not as punishing or painful as many had feared. Oil and gas companies simply needed to reapply for individual licenses. The White House’s limited change was based on two calculations: first, that inflexible sectoral sanctions don’t work, and second, that Western energy investors—with stockholder oversight and accountability to international standards—are a better bet for building a transparent, stable, pro-Western economy over the long term. This is true: Just look at the investors and interests from Russia, Iran and China which rushed to fill the void left by the “maximum pressure sanctions” of the Trump administration. Ultimately, though, the Maduro government’s reaction to the snapback was an excuse. It doesn’t fear sanctions; it fears democracy, and would have repressed opponents and undermined electoral integrity regardless.
In fact, it took only three months for the Maduro government to violate the spirit of its own promises in the October 2023 Barbados Agreement. In late January 2024, the pro-government Supreme Court upheld the disqualification of the candidate who had won an opposition primary, María Corina Machado. In the months before and after, the government detained and issued arrest warrants for members of the opposition and civil society activists.
Since then, there have also been more subtle efforts to game the election for the government. Those have included designing the ballot paper to reproduce Maduro’s image 13 times while Machado’s stand-in Edmundo González only appears three times. González’s picture is lost in a sea of images of the moustachioed incumbent president and those of six pseudo-opposition candidates (called alacranes, or scorpions, by democratic activists) favorable to the government. The result will be disorienting for 50 percent or so of voters who say they support González.
The pro-Maduro national electoral council has also re-jiggered voting rules by moving polling sites to locations favorable to the government and ensuring that those manning the election tables are pro-government. More recently, the Maduro government detained more than 38 individuals critical of the government, including members of Machado’s campaign team, and disqualified 10 elected mayors who have supported González’s candidacy.
The government’s electoral strategy of intimidating and gaming the election has been guided in part by experience. Earlier, when the regime threw up obstacles to fair elections, the opposition has opted out, as it did in 2005 and 2018. This time, despite attempts to intimidate, bait and divide the coalition of opposition parties into abstaining or breaking apart, Venezuela’s democratic opposition has remained united.
But while the opposition has undoubtedly been strengthened with the knowledge the world is watching, that international involvement will be curtailed for the election itself.
Despite its Barbados commitment to invite professional election monitors from the European Union and the Carter Center, in late May Venezuela’s electoral council revoked its invitation to the EU. Fortunately, the Carter Center is still sending a team, and last week the United Nations also agreed to send an expert panel of five officials for the contest.
While the missions are necessary to provide some measure of protection for voters and a window for the international community to understand the conditions on the ground, they are not—as the saying goes—sufficient. The Carter Center’s team will be small, and the UN expert panel is only mandated to provide a confidential report to the UN Secretary General António Guterres after the fact. Neither of them will have the presence on election day to effectively monitor the balloting, nor the mandate to potentially mediate any post-election issues, including allegations of fraud or social conflict.
Internationally, pro-Maduro groups have been attempting to sell the president’s re-election as inevitable, and his government as the best partner for welcoming and protecting oil investment, as well as renegotiating the terms of Venezuela’s defaulted debt with bondholders.
In early June, a coalition of organizations with this intent held a conference in London at the Royal Automobile Club. The meeting brought together energy investors, experts on debt re-negotiation, holders of Venezuelan debt bonds, and Venezuela’s “ambassador” to the United Kingdom. (The ambassador is not an officially recognized ambassador, but rather a holdover from the Trump administration’s failed effort in 2019 to crown a shadow government.) The summit’s promise, as reported by the Financial Times: big profits for those who supported the government on the other side of July 28. Meanwhile, what a continuation of the Maduro government’s disastrous regime would mean for Venezuelan citizens went unmentioned.
Domestically, too, the government is promoting the inevitability of its victory, attempting to discredit concerns about the credibility of the election and the opposition. In the case of the latter, the government has launched a raft of unsubstantiated allegations that the opposition is preparing to disrupt the election and dispute the results. Those supposed plans have included plots to bomb bridges, assassinate the president, and stage massive protests peremptorily denouncing the results on election day.
Concerns over the deep, potentially violent political polarization within the country has led to a series of understandable calls for reconciliation, power-sharing or co-existence. (Indeed, any stable, humane path forward for Venezuela demands a process of recognition of the political and popular legitimacy of both sides, Chavistas and opposition.)
While attractive in principle, such recommendations ignore that the Bolivarian movement has refused to recognize even the basic rights of political existence, political pluralism or the fundamental democratic rights of political opponents. The July 3, 2024 report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, details the Maduro government’s intolerance of opposition to criticism, even on matters of social policy.
An effort by the Maduro government to reach out to elements of the opposition could potentially meet with relief by those in the United States, Latin America and Europe who have long hoped for a resolution to this standoff.
But there are several issues with such a potentially pre-cooked strategy. The first of these will be that the Maduro government dictates the terms of such a coalition government after a stolen election. International embrace of a Maduro-constructed pacto de coexistencia would only serve to legitimize and solidify a stolen election. It would also reinforce an anti-democratic government’s pattern of choosing its own “opposition.” The second is that it would deny citizens’ own preferences for political change.
There will likely be a need for negotiations after July 28 for a potential broad coalition government, but that should not be dictated by an autocratic government on the back of a stolen election. Here, international organizations and monitors can play an important role to ensure any such effort is balanced and based on democratic norms.
Even with their limited footprints, the Carter Center and the UN will serve as credible conduits on what occurs in the lead up to the election and election day. The information they provide will only matter, though, if democratic governments and international organizations are prepared to act on it and in unison. Staying the course also requires private investors and bondholders to understand that even minor turbulence post-election will not be in their long-term, profit-focused interests.
If the election results do bring an opposition victory, the international community, including the UN, the EU, the U.S. and democratic neighbors Colombia and Brazil, should be prepared to offer themselves to provide post-election conflict mediation efforts and guarantees to the members of Maduro government allowing them to step aside and not face jail time.
Moreover, a stolen election should not form the basis for an artificial non-inclusive coalition dictated by the Maduro government. With Russia, Iran, and China’s already embedded efforts to expand their economic and political presence in Venezuela and the hemisphere, the geopolitical importance of defending peaceful political change extends beyond the suffering of Venezuelan citizens living in the country and the 7.7 million who have been forced to flee.
In a non-coincidental port of call, two Russian warships visited Venezuela last week. And this week the Maduro government invited the Russian government to send a group of election “observers” to accompany their election in July. Along with the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Iranian governments, Russia will be doing everything it can to scuttle international interests in a free and fair election—one which represents the best possibility for Venezuelans’ hopes for change in recent memory.