Despite having agreed to hold a recall referendum that could remove him from power before the scheduled end of his term in 2024, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro imposed rules considered by the opposition to be impossible to comply with.
The country’s Constitution establishes that all positions elected through popular elections can be revoked after half-term via referendum. To convene it, it is necessary to collect the signatures of 20% of voters eligible to vote within a period established by the National Electoral Council (CNE).
But the CNE itself threw a cold shower on the initiative. On Friday (22), it established that opponents of the Venezuelan Movement for the Repeal (Mover) would have only 12 hours this Wednesday (26) to collect the 4.2 million signatures needed, leaving them with no time to carry out a campaign for the population. . More than 1,200 polling stations will be open to collect signatures.
“It’s a joke. It’s humanly impossible to collect signatures in this established period. Nor can we expose the population to huge queues amid the outbreak of the ômicron variant,” said former governor César Pérez Vivas, one of the members of Mover, which belongs to the Copei party.
Another member of the movement, the dissident of Chavismo Nicmer Evans, defends that no attempt is made to collect signatures this Wednesday and that a new date be negotiated.
Roberto Picón, a member of the CNE but not aligned with Chavismo, admitted that it was not feasible to collect signatures within the specified time frame. “We will have to process five voters a minute, for 12 hours, on every machine in the country, with no margin of error.” Picón, however, is a minority among the five presidents of the electoral body. Two, including him, are sympathetic to the opposition, and three, to Chavismo.
Other sectors of the opposition, such as the group led by Juan Guaidó, former president of the National Assembly, are looking for another way out of the Venezuelan political crisis. “I support both a recall referendum and a plebiscite in which the population gives us support to call a presidential election before 2024. It makes no sense to wait for the end of this illegitimate mandate,” Guaidó told leaf. “If the repeal has so many obstacles, let a plebiscite be held, as has already occurred [em 2017, a oposição realizou uma consulta popular, cujo resultado não foi aceito pelo regime], but with guarantees that the result is respected.”
The opposition leader also says he believes in a return to the negotiations interrupted in Mexico to make this plebiscite viable and in the return of demonstrations. That is why he is calling the population to the streets “in a peaceful way” for February 12, to press for an early electoral exit.
For Freddy Superlano, candidate barred from participating in the election in Barinas, what happened in the election on the 9th is proof that, “even with the playing field tilted, it is possible to win against Chavismo”.
The state governor’s election in November was interrupted when the count gave Superlano an advantage. His candidacy was then revoked, on the grounds that he is responding to corruption charges, and the election was redone. Still, the opposition won with Sergio Garrido, ousting the Chávez clan and its allies from power in Barinas for the first time in 20 years.
“There is no democracy or the rule of law in Venezuela, but what happened was that we pressed, we made a very local, very focused campaign. We did not give up in the face of the attempt to challenge and we imposed ourselves with a good advantage. located can make what happened in Barinas become an example of what can be done throughout the country”, said Superlano to leaf.
Political analyst Colette Capriles agrees that the episode is a “good experience to be applied across Venezuela” and that “Barinas has shown that a return to local politics is more effective than anti-Chavista discourse.” “The opposition has a lot to gain by following this strategy at the national level.”
For Capriles, a referendum or a plebiscite later this year would be “absurd, because the opposition has no project or candidate.” “His only project in recent years was to try to remove Maduro, and Venezuela’s main problem today is not changing leaders. Chávez left, and Chavismo continued. It is necessary to build alternative models to the apparatus that Chavismo created, in addition to a legitimate candidacy.” consensual. Guaidó’s experience did not work, and the dialogue in Mexico will not return”, he says.
“An early election will put Maduro in the victim position, and he will get back on his feet.”
