The Venezuelan opposition has announced that primaries are on the horizon. Will they achieve with them the validation of a leadership capable of disputing power with Chavismo in 2024? To address this questioning, we must understand the current fragmentation of the Venezuelan opposition and its antecedents.
The opposition’s electoral growth between 2009 and 2016 was linked to the creation of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), a coordination mechanism created by different opposition parties to increase their competitiveness.
However, due to the process of autocratization that involved the selective use of different mechanisms of repression by the government of Nicolás Maduro, the irresolvable struggle for hegemony of the opposition leadership and a myopic management of its success in the parliamentary elections of 2015, the MUD was dismantled.
Since then, opposition groups have not been able to coordinate effectively. The diagnosis of a weakened opposition can be seen through the 2021 regional elections, in which the opposition bloc had the opportunity to leverage its own competitive potential, even when measured against the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela).
Although the Venezuelan opposition then had electoral potential at the subnational level, as we pointed out in a recent publication, it was unable to take advantage of it. In 2021, the unofficial vote surpassed the government bloc by more than 50% in 19 of the 23 states that make up the Venezuelan regional map.
However, this margin resulted in only four governments in favor. Put another way, the voter who voted for a candidate other than the PSUV did so by selecting one of several anti-government options. This meant that the proportion of votes received by all these candidates in their entirety exceeded the proportion of votes registered by the government candidate.
This picture contrasts with the trend of previous subnational elections. In previous elections, the MUD concentrated almost all the votes different from the candidates of the ruling party, even though its electoral ceiling was not high enough to win more governance in its favor.
Faced with the failure to bring about a political regime change since 2019, a kind of rectification of the institutional route seems to be emerging. Several parties have resumed the work of organizing and mobilizing their militancy and society, and have announced their participation in the primaries in 2023, with a view to the 2024 presidential elections. Does this open up a possibility for the reconstitution of the opposition? It depends.
It is worth remembering that primary elections constitute a mechanism for selecting possible candidates among many others. Therefore, these are not a political strategy or a means to choose a “country vision” or a “national leadership”, but a coordination tool just to decide who will compete against Maduro in 2024.
Furthermore, primaries require prior coordination in terms of funding, training of the organizing team, pre- and post-election regulations and agreements, witness training, voter mobilization and, fundamentally, consensus on an objective and a prior strategy to be effective. in the future.
In this sense, the absence of institutionalized agreements before the primaries and, in a particular context of weakened parties, could imply the deepening of collective action problems, such as low alignment of incentives to work around collective long-term goals, inability to neutralize opportunists and little mutual credibility.
The primaries could motivate a “winner-takes-all” mentality, which would imply that, after the internal elections, individual incentives over collective incentives on the part of the winner and his party prevail, especially once they gain access to more financial resources and, therefore, dominate decision-making on behalf of the rest and of Venezuelan society.
On the other hand, it could compromise the representativeness factor, since a candidate could be selected that represents a mobilized minority, but not the majority that aspires to political changes in Venezuela.
Without a prior formal coordination mechanism, primaries could exacerbate fragmentation and polarization between opposing parties and groups. This possibility, in an authoritarian context, could be exploited by the government to maximize contradictions and further appeal to co-optation and selective repression to reinforce the divide. This would deepen the incentives for some sectors to opt for a maximalist strategy or “spoiler” of the electoral process.
The challenge facing the Venezuelan opposition is enormous and cannot be (fully) resolved by holding primaries. On the contrary, given the current fragmentation, it is important to prioritize the work of building a new pro-democracy coalition between young politicians and experienced leaders who create and assume more realistic positions, ready to negotiate and committed to a transition to democracy.
A broad, inclusive and innovative movement that strengthens ties with civil society, and that empathizes with the needs of the population, could generate hope and thus motivate the mass mobilization necessary for possible change in the future.
*Translation from Spanish by Giulia Gaspar
