A Fraudulent Election
Venezuela’s regime is attempting to subvert democracy.
A very important election took place last Sunday, July 28, in Venezuela. For two decades the country has been run into the ground first by Hugo Chávez and then by the current president, Nicolás Maduro. In a country that used to have a population of around 30 million, some 7-8 million have gone into exile or sought to flee to the United States; the country’s GDP has fallen by over two-thirds since the early 2010s. The refugee flow has been destabilizing all over Latin America, and is one of the greatest contributors to the flood of asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border.
This election cycle, the democratic opposition has been led by María Corina Machado, a highly charismatic politician who has traveled the whole country building opposition to the current Maduro regime. She was disqualified from running herself, but she and her allies threw their support behind a former diplomat, Edmundo González. The Maduro regime quickly declared victory on election day, but pre-election polling and exit polls indicated that González had something like a 30 percentage point lead over Maduro. The well-organized opposition has gathered data from polling machines all over the country, data that confirms the scale of the electoral theft that took place. Hector Fuentes, a pro-democracy activist supporting the opposition, explains both the nature of the fraud and the basis for the opposition’s confidence in the scale of their victory in this video:
The struggle has moved into the streets, where protests by ordinary Venezuelans are being met with extreme violence by the country’s security forces. Whether the regime bows to popular pressure this time around will depend on the scale of protests and the degree of repression, as well as the responses of external actors in the region and internationally. This is one of the most critical elections in this “year of elections,” and will be a bellwether of democracy’s ability to push back against authoritarian government.
Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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