Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday, July 28 to cast their votes for president. Despite facing immense hurdles, the opposition appeared to secure enough votes to soundly defeat the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro. Nonetheless, after the polls closed, the national electoral council (CNE) declared Maduro had won a third term with 51% of the vote.
Despite the government’s claims, exit polls and the opposition count of tallies from 73% of the country’s voting machines suggest that Edmundo González, the opposition candidate, won by a large margin. Anti-Maduro protests have erupted across the country, with government security forces in riot gear responding to some of the protests with batons and tear gas.
How can we understand what’s going on in Venezuela?
Maduro was never Chávez
Nicolás Maduro began his political career as a union leader before being elected to the legislature in 2000 during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. He then served in various roles in Chávez’s administration, becoming vice president and designated successor during Chávez’s battle with cancer in 2012-2013.
Despite Venezuela’s political polarization, Chávez remained a highly popular president throughout his time in office. As Michael Shifter, senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, notes, Chávez was highly charismatic – and consistently popular with poor Venezuelans in part because he “projected a sincere concern for those living in poverty.” He also regularly included them through mechanisms of popular consultation such as referenda. Yet Chávez also dismantled many features of liberal democracy in Venezuela, systematically eliminating constraints on the president. He saw the political system he inherited as corrupt, serving only elites, and considered these changes a necessary break with the past.
Upon Chávez’s death in March 2013, Maduro became acting president. Venezuela scheduled elections that April. Despite the electoral advantage of being Chávez’s chosen successor, Maduro won with only a slim margin – 50.66% of the vote, compared to the opposition’s 49.07%. This was a dramatic drop from Chávez’s 12 percentage point margin of victory in the presidential elections only six months prior.
While Maduro pledged to firmly follow in Chávez’s footsteps, he lacked his predecessor’s rhetorical skill and was prone to gaffes. For example, several months after the election he fell off his bicycle on live television. Maduro tried to mimic Chávez’s fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric – yet failed to create the same feeling of closeness to the people, according to political scientist Caitlin Andrews-Lee. Instead, he regularly highlights his connections to Chávez in order to generate legitimacy second-hand.
Venezuela’s economic crisis
Maduro inherited an economy that was beginning a freefall. Venezuela is highly dependent on oil. Chávez became president just as oil prices began a record rise. The oil revenues allowed Chávez to fund popular social programs, but his politicization of the state oil company and failure to reinvest in it led to declining oil production. Then Maduro came to power with a weakened state oil company, just before oil prices began to tumble. By 2015, the economy was in “a full-blown crisis” that only worsened after the 2019 U.S.-imposed sanctions, which included a ban on Venezuelan oil.
The deepening economic crisis generated a humanitarian crisis. Food and medicine shortages along with the country’s failing electricity and water infrastructure have pushed millions to leave Venezuela.
Lacking Chávez’s popularity – and trying to govern a country in economic crisis – Maduro leaned into authoritarian methods of control. For example, political scientist John Polga-Hecimovich notes that while Chávez used government resources and institutions to attack and hamper opposition leaders, he competed in and won relatively free elections. But Maduro has relied on outright fraud to win elections. Additionally, as political scientist Javier Corrales outlines, Maduro continued to politicize the judiciary and successfully neutralized the legislature. He has leaned on the military, aggressively policing dissent within the institution to ensure loyalty. And his government has responded to protests with repression.
Maduro’s election meddling
Maduro’s meddling in the 2024 election began well before July 28. A year before the elections, the government banned María Corina Machado, the most popular opposition candidate, from holding public office. Machado nonetheless participated in the opposition primaries in October 2023, winning more than 90% of the vote. But the Venezuelan supreme court, stacked with Maduro’s allies, suspended the results. In January, the court upheld the government’s ban on her ability to hold office.
Machado continued campaigning, first as a presumptive candidate, and then for the consensus opposition coalition candidate, Edmundo González. However, the opposition campaign faced numerous obstacles. Police arrested several campaign staffers in March, then arrested Machado’s security chief less than two weeks before the election. Even ordinary people that supported the campaign in tangential ways – for example, by delivering water to a rally or serving campaign staff in a restaurant – have been detained and arrested in the lead up to the election.
The CNE introduced procedural barriers, aiming to make it harder for opposition supporters to vote and monitor the vote. Maduro’s allies in the electoral commission increased the number of polling places with a single ballot box and mandated that election observers could only carry out their duties at their own polling place. The opposition expected that these changes would create long lines to vote and make it more difficult for election monitors to be present at all polling places.
Electoral fraud
It appears that Maduro’s final tactic of electoral manipulation involved engaging in electoral fraud. The CNE remained loyal to Maduro, announcing results that presented a dramatically different outcome than numerous pre-election and election-day exit polls suggested. In addition, the CNE excluded the top opposition official, who should have been allowed to witness the overall national count.
The government has not released the detailed tally sheets from each polling station, but the opposition has created a website with their count of the tally sheets they have collected, around three-quarters of the total. This count reveals an opposition victory in line with the polling data. Maduro claims that he cannot release the tally sheets because the electoral system was hacked, but he has asked his supreme court to audit the results.
The authoritarian electoral game
If a leader has no interest in respecting electoral results, why would they hold an election? In authoritarian regimes, the purpose of general elections is not to determine who rules, but these exercises still have value. For one, Western countries often use aid as part of their democracy promotion efforts. So holding multiparty elections may enable a country to access international resources. The appearance of a competitive election was thus important in Venezuela’s efforts to get the United States to relax sanctions.
Authoritarian elections may also serve other purposes, as political scientists Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust explain. For example, elections can be a tool to divide the opposition. Opposition activists may have mixed incentives regarding participation in authoritarian elections. How the regime structures the election and who they allow to participate can create disagreement over the value of creating coalitions or even participating in elections at all. This was the case in Venezuela’s 2018 elections. In those elections, Maduro effectively divided and demobilized the opposition.
Gandhi and Lust also note that authoritarians can use elections to boost their legitimacy. Authoritarian leaders can claim that their rule – and, by extension, their policies – are a product of the popular will. Immediately after the CNE announced Venezuela’s official election results this week, Maduro proclaimed: “I can say before the people of Venezuela and the world: I am Nicolás Maduro Moros, reelected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
As protesters across the country turned out to question the election results, Maduro’s administration leaned even harder on the official election results. In a televised speech, Defense Minister Padrino López asserted: “We confirm our absolute loyalty and unconditional support for President Nicolás Maduro, our legitimately elected commander in chief.” Building on the claims of electoral legitimacy, Padrino López called protesters “coup-plotters allied with foreign enemies” – and warned that the regime was justified in the use of force against the protesters.
Elections can also be a risky gambit
For Venezuela, agreeing to hold competitive elections was a prerequisite to secure relief from U.S. oil sanctions. And Maduro risked backlash for failing to hold credible elections. In this election, these concerns helped create conditions that enabled the opposition to come together in support of González.
And despite Maduro’s attempts to claim legitimacy based on these electoral results, this effort has largely failed in the international arena. The Carter Center, one of the few international election monitoring groups Venezuela allowed into the country, reported that the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” And many international leaders have condemned the elections.
Of course, fraudulent elections are also risky because they provide a focal point for protests. Venezuela’s protesters responded to the perceived fraud with calls for freedom and for the end of the Maduro government. The anger at the current regime has even affected the long, durable support for former President Chávez. Across the country, protesters demanding change have targeted statues of Chávez. Can Maduro weather this storm? He has already begun cracking down on the opposition. And the military has to this point remained loyal to the regime. While Maduro has faced significant international condemnation for his actions surrounding the election, Russia and China, who have backed the regime both economically and militarily, have reaffirmed their support.
Heather Sullivan is a 2024-2025 Good Authority fellow.
