Venezuela’s Maduro just tightened his grip on power. What comes next?

After years of turmoil, Venezuela held national elections on Sunday. Voters of various political affiliations hoped the contest would put an end to the political strife and economic difficulties that have gripped the country for a decade. But with most of the votes counted, both current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and opposition candidate Edmundo González […]

After years of turmoil, Venezuela held national elections on Sunday. Voters of various political affiliations hoped the contest would put an end to the political strife and economic difficulties that have gripped the country for a decade. But with most of the votes counted, both current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and opposition candidate Edmundo González have declared victory.

Maduro claimed 51 percent of the vote, with González earning 44 percent according to the national electoral commission. But González was quick to challenge those results, with his party claiming their exit polls showed the opposition winning as much as 70 percent of the vote. Several countries, including the US, have cast doubt on Maduro’s victory given alleged irregularities, and the fact that international election observers were, in many cases, unable to perform their duties.

Maduro exercises significant control over the government, including the parliament and the judiciary. Though the election commission is nominally independent, the opposition claims that it acted on behalf of the Maduro government. 

For now, González and his allies, as well as US officials, have asked for tabulated results from the elections authority and told supporters to remain calm. Small protests have broken out in Caracas, after the regime accused María Corina Machado and other opposition leaders of planning a cyber attack against the country’s electoral apparatus on Monday. Venezuelans rose up against the Maduro government in 2014, 2017, and 2019. The opposition has urged followers to remain calm, but If protests break out again, it could mean further repression and violence.

Maduro’s victory shouldn’t come as a surprise

Sunday’s results mean Maduro seems headed for a third term in office — something that wasn’t possible before his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chávez amended the constitution in 2009 to remove presidential term limits.

But Maduro seemed to backtrack on his authoritarian tendencies in October 2023, when his government agreed to hold free and competitive elections in exchange for further easing of US sanctions (Chevron has been permitted to operate in Venezuela since 2022).

But this past January the supreme court — understood to be tightly aligned with Maduro and his followers, the Chavistas — barred a popular opposition leader (former lawmaker and longtime opposition activist Machado) from running for office for the next 15 years due to supposed financial irregularities from her time in parliament. Then, when a coalition of opposition factions tried to rally around another candidate, the government also prevented him from running, days before the registration deadline. 

At the last minute, the opposition coalesced around González, a retired diplomat, who was not widely known before the presidential race.

Even with these maneuvers, polling indicated that González posed a credible threat to Maduro; González was expected to earn about 65 percent of the vote, according to multiple surveys.

“If Maduro had both the capacity and the desire to totally shut this thing down, he would have done it by now — so he’s either lacking the will or the capacity,” Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox. “My guess is he’s lacking the capacity, there’s some kind of internal politics within Chavismo, some kind of internal constraints keeping him from taking more radical action like banning González or arresting María Corina Machado.” 

Still, while the opposition might have been a threat to Maduro’s rule, they weren’t necessarily looking to upend the political order. “I think they [were] being pretty realistic that they’re going to have to work with some of the Chavista-controlled institutions,” Freeman told Vox — institutions like the military, the judiciary, and the parliament. “Nowhere has the opposition said that they want to hold a constituent assembly and write a new constitution, which would be the only real way of making a clean break.”

Maduro’s Chavismo, rather than being practiced as a consistent socialist ideology, is more about understanding the US as interlopers in Venezuelan politics — and the opposition as their proxy. That’s not totally without foundation, given a bizarre 2020 coup attempt that involved Americans and the US’s extremely antagonistic stance towards Maduro, with the Trump administration supporting a rival who declared he was the true president. 

But the ruling class’s priorities are not advancing Venezuelans’ interests or autonomy. They are much more about maintaining control of the justice system and avoiding prison time under a new government — as well as keeping access to the wealth they accrue from government contracts and oil rents. Venezuela is the most oil-rich country in South America, which still drives the country’s economy despite heavy US sanctions on the industry and a lack of investment and production under Maduro.

With six more years of Maduro seemingly in store, Venezuelans are likely in for more of the same: government corruption, severe inequality, mass poverty, and state repression and violence. Voters who put their hope in the opposition could take to the streets in protest — but as long as the military remains allied with Maduro, demonstrations are unlikely to provoke a change in leadership. 

“The international community is watching, and we will respond accordingly,” a senior US State Department official said during a press call Monday. 

But what that response might look like is unclear. The US reimposed sanctions in April, after loosening them last October on the basis of Maduro’s concession to hold elections. And the Biden administration gave up Maduro ally Alex Saab in a prisoner swap deal earlier this year — depriving the US of key leverage.

Venezuelans have suffered. The opposition offered hope.

After Chávez was elected in 1998, poverty decreased due to socialist government programs, but his mismanagement of the oil sector — plus a variety of US sanctions — meant that, over time, there wasn’t enough money to support those programs. Chávez also seriously damaged democratic institutions, yet he was still highly popular among Venezuelans, especially those in the working class. Maduro, once Chávez’s bodyguard, continued and even accelerated Chávez’s authoritarian tendencies, without really being able to uphold the socialist measures that made his predecessor popular. Venezuela’s economy has spiraled particularly since he took office, resulting in a surge of migration out of the country — to neighboring Colombia and to the US. 

For those who’ve stayed, life has increasingly spiraled into economic precarity; though inflation has cooled to 50 percent, it’s been as high as 130,000 percent in recent years, due to a drop in oil prices and crushing economic sanctions imposed by the US. Even though inflation is improving, wages haven’t risen even to mitigate that 50 percent rate.

Ordinary people, unable to afford the basic necessities of life, hoped for a return to more prosperous times. And perhaps just as importantly, there was hope that some of the 7.7 million Venezuelans who have fled the country for better opportunities elsewhere or to escape repression, might return and help rebuild the country.

Now, that future seems unlikely. Still, Venezuelans are heading out to the streets now, despite credible accusations of serious human rights violations against the security forces, including extrajudicial killings, excessive use of force against protesters, politically motivated prosecutions, unlawful detentions, and torture.