Date Posted: 22-Jul-2024
Author: Estefania Dominguez, UK
Venezuela's presidential election is scheduled for 28 July 2024. In this feature, senior analyst Estefania Dominguez provides a primer on what is needed to understand the unfolding electoral process, which has been characterised by the constant suppression of a united opposition
Key points
- Venezuela's presidential election for the 2025–31 term is scheduled for 28 July, with Maduro representing 13 political parties, two candidates representing the opposition, and seven other candidates who are accused by the opposition of being government collaborators
- Any unity of the opposition poses the greatest threat to Maduro's re-election, and as such the administration has taken several measures to drastically lower the likelihood of a unified opposition victory such as manipulating the candidate pool, weaponising the electoral institutions' incompetence, obstructing international oversight, and using the threat of direct violence by Colectivos against opposition candidates and supporters
- As a whole these measures make it extremely unlikely that the elections will be free and fair, thereby substantially raising the risk of pro-opposition protests after the election, which could quickly turn violent amid a highly likely repressive state response
The election for the 2025–31 presidential term in Venezuela will take place on 28 July. According to the electoral calendar of the National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral: CNE), 10 candidates from 38 parties will campaign from 4 to 25 July. According to the Organic Law on Electoral Processes and the Constitution, the president must be elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage, and by relative majority (the candidate with the highest number of votes wins).
Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro (2013–25) is running for re-election for the second time for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela: PSUV). Presidential re-election is allowed indefinitely in Venezuela under Article 341 of the constitution, as amended by the First Amendment to the Constitution of 2008, introduced by then President Hugo Chávez (2002–13).
The main opposition candidate is Edmundo González Urrutia, a representative of the United Democratic Platform (Plataforma Unitaria Democrática: PUD). González took the leadership of the PUD in March 2024 after the opposition faced difficulties in registering its candidate and after the ratification of the political disqualification in January 2024 of María Corina Machado – who won the PUD's primaries with 92% (2.2 million) of the votes – forcing her to drop out of the race. Since then, the main opposition to Maduro has been organised within the PUD.
A commentary published by International Crisis Group, a non-profit NGO, on 28 June said that a González-led opposition victory could set in motion a process of transition of power. However, it would be a slow and complicated process due to the continued control of the other branches of the state by Maduro and the Chavistas – which refers to the broader movement of supporters of Chávez, including state officials and the bureaucracy that is currently divided between supporters of Maduro (Maduristas) and Chavistas who reject him. As such it should be understood that while all Maduristas are Chavistas not all Chavistas are Maduristas. This control of other branches of the state would also complicate the Legislative Assembly elections to be held in 2025.
Maduro would be at high risk of losing the election if it were to be conducted freely and fairly. This is a consequence of Maduro's government having been marked by a long-running economic, humanitarian, and political crisis that has forced more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to emigrate between February 2018 and June 2024. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) website accessed on 18 July, the rising cost of living, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and unemployment rates continue to rise, exacerbating the country's humanitarian emergency.
Sectoral sanctions have also aggravated an already precarious situation. According to the July 2024 UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report, Human Rights Situation in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , deficiencies in access to and supply of water, electricity, and fuel have been intensified by the impact of sectoral sanctions. The report also stated that sanctions are “hampering the receipt of funds and the import of essential goods, including food and medicine”. The capping of the minimum wage at USD4 a month to curb hyperinflation has reduced the capacity of much of the population to procure basic goods.
In addition to this, the Maduro administration has further tightened its control on political and civil structures. In its Freedom in the World 2024 index, Freedom House rated Venezuela as “not free”, with a score of 15 out of 100 for political rights and civil liberties. According to Freedom House, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are the only countries in the Americas region that are not considered free in 2024. Indeed, the Maduristas have shaped the entire electoral process to give themselves sufficient guarantees of victory, including manipulation of the candidate pool, the weaponisation of institutional incompetence, the lack of international monitoring on election day, and the threat of direct violence by third parties – each of which will be detailed below. Ultimately, the goal of these ‘guarantees' is to split the opposition vote in favour of Maduro, since he does not need a majority to support him in order to win, only that the anti-Maduro votes be sufficiently dispersed among the opposition presidential candidates. It is the unity of the opposition that poses the greatest potential threat to Maduro's electoral chances.
Moulding the candidates' pool
The 10 presidential candidates can be divided into three groups: the Maduristas, the orthodox anti-Chavistas, and the so-called ‘Alacranes' (scorpions) that collectively represents a total of 21 political parties. The Maduristas represent 13 parties and are led by Maduro, who represents the status quo (or oficialismo). The orthodox anti-Chavistas, also known as the orthodox opposition, seek to remove Maduro from the presidency, and are represented by the PUD, which includes two political parties led by González – the Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mesa de la Unidad Democrática: MUD) and the Movement for Venezuela (Movimiento por Venezuela).
The third group of candidates are known as the Alacranes, a pejorative term broadly used to describe collaborators of the ruling party. The term stems from Operación Alacrán (Operation Scorpion), a corruption scheme in which the PSUV bribed opposition Congress members with government positions and contracts to vote against Juan Guaidó's – an opposition leader and former interim president (2019–23) – re-election as president of the National Assembly in 2019. The group now forms the majority of candidates on the ballot paper and includes candidates from parties that are the only officially recognised opposition. This group does not typically receive a significant number of votes, but serves to split the opposition vote, therefore improving Maduro's chances of winning a majority. Seven of the candidates on the ballot are considered Alacranes by the orthodox opposition and the anti-Maduro Chavistas, and they represent the parties that signed the 20 June Agreement on the Recognition of the Results of the Presidential Election, which had been proposed by the CNE and pushed by Maduro to commit candidates to recognising the election results. Of the total number of candidates, only González and Enrique Márquez – former CNE vice-president and candidate for the Centrados party – refused to sign the agreement. González via his X (formerly Twitter) account on 20 June, and Márquez in a press conference on 21 June, argued that the agreement was a unilateral imposition by the CNE and that it was redundant, since the Constitution and the 2023 Barbados Agreement (signed between Maduro and the opposition and containing electoral guarantees) already included the recognition of the election results by all candidates.
The Alacranes also include parties that the orthodox opposition claims, as they did in 2019 during Operación Alacrán, have been co-opted by oficialismo and are now led by dissidents of the orthodox opposition, namely opposition figures who have broken away from the formal lines of opposition organisations. These dissenters have relied on the High Court of Justice (Tribunal Superior de Justicia: TSJ), to hand them the leadership of opposition parties through the introduction of judicial measures. An example of this is José Brito, who in the context of Operación Alacrán was expelled from the Primero Justicia party (the main opposition party that Henrique Capriles represented in the 2011 presidential elections) in 2019 after the party accused him of making secret pacts with the PSUV. In 2020 Brito filed an amparo (an appeal for constitutional protection) against Primero Justicia in the Supreme Court of Justice, demanding his reinstatement, and in June 2020 the TSJ judicially intervened in the party. In April 2024 the TSJ issued a ruling granting Brito the leadership of the party arguing that the party had committed “arbitrary and anarchic” acts by denying Brito his right to reply. The same practice was repeated in 2020 with the Democratic Action, Popular Will, and Independent Electoral Political Organisation Committee (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente: COPEI) parties, all of which are currently led by opposition dissidents.
During the process of candidate nomination, which took place in March 2024, the Maduristas had another opportunity to filter the pool of candidates participating in the electoral contest, including through the use of political disqualification. The most notable case of this practice was the disqualification from public office of González's predecessor Machado, who had been elected to lead the PUD after winning the October 2023 primaries on behalf of the MUD. Machado has been disqualified twice in her political career, the first time in 2015 when she was temporarily disqualified for 12 months for inconsistencies in her 2014 asset declaration after being removed as a member of Congress in 2014. The second occurred in June 2023 after the Office of the Comptroller General of Venezuela (Contraloría General de Venezuela: CGR) announced the disqualification of Machado for 15 years. The TSJ ratified the disqualification in January 2024 for participating in campaigns in support of US sanctions against Venezuela and for supporting Guaidó – interim president of Venezuela after the 2018 presidential election resulted in Maduro's re-election that was considered fraudulent by the US, the European Union (EU), and other countries.
In March 2024 the opposition nominated Corina Yoris (who had never been a member of any party organisation) to replace Machado after her disqualification. However, hours before the deadline to register for the presidential election on 25 March, Yoris was unable to do so. According to the Associated Press on 25 March, opposition leader Delsa Solórzano claimed that the CNE's website for registering candidates had been blocked. The PUD denounced that a technical failure on the CNE's website prevented Yoris from receiving a validation code to access the platform that would have started her registration. The CNE initiated an impromptu extension of 12 hours on 25 March, when the opposition managed to register González, initially as a temporary candidate, as a PUD candidate in order to secure a seat in the race. According to Bulletin 122, published by Venezuelan NGO Electoral Observatory of Venezuela (Observatorio Electoral de Venezuela: OEV) – whose work has been used to inform UN Human Rights Council and EU Election Observation Mission (EU-EOM) reports – on 1 April 2024, the CNE excluded eight parties from the presidential electoral process and “handled the registration of new political organisations in a discretionary manner”. This reduced the pool of plausible candidates to 10.
Anti-Maduro Chavistas such as Rafael Ramírez Carreño were among those who rejected the CNE's actions on 25 March. Ramírez served as Venezuela's Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2014–17) during Maduro's presidency and as president of Petróleos de Venezuela (2004–14) and minister of petroleum and mining (2002–14) during Chávez's presidency. On 26 March Ramírez accused Maduro on his X account of violating the constitution over the elections and that the government “is doing whatever it wants: persecutes, imprisons, kidnaps family members, confiscates party tickets, and now disqualifies any candidate it doesn't like. This will be a race of scorpions, but never free and fair elections”.
Opposition figures have also been arrested as a means of dissuasion. On 20 March Venezuela's Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced the arrest of two members of Machado's campaign and issued arrest warrants for several others. According to a 30 April report in Spanish newspaper El País , at least 20 members of Machado's political circle had been detained and prosecuted since the start of the election campaign, and six of them have taken refuge in the Argentinian embassy in the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
In addition, over the last 12 months the Maduro government has introduced laws or articles in laws to persecute those who speak out against the government. These include the introduction of laws such as the April 2024 Law against Fascism, Neo-Fascism and Similar Expressions, which classifies as “prohibited messages” any communications that promote acts of violence “as a method of political action”, and gives the Public Ministry of Venezuela the power to determine which messages or acts are interpreted within the law.
Edmundo González Urrutia, candidate for the United Democratic Platform. (Janes)
The Maduro administration has variously used these measures to shape the pool of candidates to split the opposition vote, increasing its leader's chances of winning more votes. In this way, the oficialismo can win elections when the opposition is disorganised and divided. This is achieved by co-opting leaders from parties that have participated in unified proposals, such as Brito and Primero Justicia. The oficialismo also relies on other measures, such as institutional incompetence, lack of international oversight, and threats of violence from third parties to ensure that the electoral process favours the Maduristas.
