Caracas Chronicles

Voter confidence has now vanished 

After the Maduro regime stole the presidential election in 2024, Venezuelans seem to have quit the strongest institution of their democratic culture: voting. Maria Corina Machado said that turnout was no more than 13% (thanks to her campaign to boycott this election, she suggests), while CNE stated that turnout was about 42%, which is utter nonsense. 

You see, turnout in Venezuela is announced as a share of the entire Electoral Registry, which for the 2024 presidential election amassed 21.32 million registered voters, of which 4 million are based (but not registered) abroad, and another 4 million never vote—the so-called abstención estructural. For instance, turnout in the elections that Edmundo González won was about 60%, as reported by María Corina’s campaign command and unofficial observers. But if one makes the calculation in terms of the number of registered voters within the country, that number is closer to 80%. An astonishing figure for a remarkable election that was stolen, of course.

A trace of migration

This time, Carlos Quintero—the CNE’s vice president, the guy who basically runs the institution nowadays and organized this vote while the other rectors stood as useless figureheads—most probably made up that 42% figure by calculating turnout based on some 13 million based in Venezuela and registered to vote there (CNE has baptized them as electores activos or active voters, apparently a new term in Venezuelan electoral jargon). If the math is done considering the entire Electoral Registry, the CNE’s official turnout for the so-called mega-election should be around 25%, if it’s true that 5.5 million people actually cast their votes yesterday. As noted by Eugenio Martínez, Quintero’s figure can count as an official acknowledgement from the Maduro regime that more than four million Venezuelans have fled the country (not the 2.5 million mentioned by Maduro last year).

PSUV looks better than Maduro

Another funny nugget: Quintero claimed that chavismo’s Gran Polo Patriotico coalition got 82,62% of the votes on Sunday, which equals arounds 4.5 million votes. That’s more than the independent projections for Maduro’s support in the 2024, which estimate he received about 4.1 million votes in last year’s election (the opposition’s own count, based on available tallies, put Maduro at 3.38 million votes—but with 15% of the actas still missing, the actual number is certainly higher.) So either the CNE is pretending Maduro is now more popular than he was a year ago—which is likely false—or chavista candidates for parliament and governorships somehow outperformed him this time.

Spitting out the amnesia pill 

Distrust of the electoral system—fueled by conspiracy theories, but also reasonable doubt—has grown in Venezuela for many years. But the massive fraud of 2024 against Edmundo González Urrutia dealt a decisive, unbearable blow to a long-standing practice, rooted in the Venezuelan democratic tradition that started in 1958. It’s true that parliamentary and regional elections wouldn’t have as much turnout as presidential ones, but abstention yesterday was evident in the urban landscape, where streets seemed more populous of security agents than of ordinary citizens. If we add the people who still belong to chavista grassroots groups, the people that was forced to vote against their will, the members of opposition parties who decided to take part in the election, and the independent voters who decided to vote no matter what, the actual turnout is still ridiculously low—and demonstrates the failure of the once-mighty PSUV machinery, the dismal mobilization capacity for parties like Un Nuevo Tiempo, and especially the frustration, ire and disappointment of the vast majority of Venezuelans after what happened on July 28, 2024. 

We agree with the interpretation that sees abstention as a silent, nationwide protest against electoral fraud. No amount of chavista propaganda can create the illusion that July 28 has been forgotten, and the nation is willing to play along with a democratic charade under an autocracy. 

Normalization at gunpoint

One question remains: if the government wanted people to vote yesterday, why did it fill the streets with masked police squads? The deployment of security forces fits the traditional narrative of a frustrated plot around every election, that this time justified the detention of opposition leader Juan Carlos Guanipa and some 70 other people. But that contradicts the other narrative of everything’s fine in the Bolivarian fatherland, which this election was supposed to advance. It could look like a contradiction between Maduro’s discourse of peace and order under his necessary rule, and Cabello’s permanent fear mongering that justifies brutality and his role as Interior Minister. However, beware of drawing far-fetched conclusions: chavismo always appears to contradict itself, and this apparent dichotomy between Maduro and Cabello shouldn’t be taken as a crevasse that is fracturing the dictatorship.

Rosales out, Capriles in

Manuel Rosales and Un Nuevo Tiempo have consistently found a way to preserve some room in the opposition’s leadership, or at least limit the dominant influence that comes from Caracas, which in the past emanated from Leopoldo López and Voluntad Popular plus Primero Justicia, and since 2023 has been concentrated by Machado and her Vente Venezuela team and associates. From his comfortable seat in the Zulia governorship, Rosales was against the 2023 opposition primaries that Machado won in a landslide. Before CNE approved Edmundo’s nomination, Rosales tried to convince the coalition that he was the right unitary candidate—only a palatable governor could aspire to be a palatable president—as María Corina was banned from running

Since Maduro got away with the fraud, Rosales has insisted on surviving under the dictator’s rules, and broke out of unity to take part in the regional election. Result: he lost. Chavismo took all states save Cojedes (not a very relevant one), where rainbow veteran Alberto Galíndez remains the only “opposition” governor in the map (an Acción Democrática mayor and governor in the 1990s, who then switched to Primero Justicia in 2015 before being expelled this year and needing to run as an independent). For Maduro, Rosales was not loyal enough, and still too close to Machado. And chavismo, as predicted by the witch hunt of mayors in that state, wanted big, strategic Zulia back. 

Together they led the meagre systemic opposition campaign through the UNT-UNICA alliance, but Henrique Capriles and Manuel Rosales won’t be in office at the same time. Capriles was even more vocal than Rosales about “preserving spaces” and taking part in this election, completed his arc from the anti-chavista champion in 2012 and 2013 to again member of the National Assembly. He started his political career as the last vice president of the extinct Congress; he may end it as a pawn in a legislature entirely controlled by Maduro. Now, Maduro and Co. will point at Capriles and a few others—like perennial negotiator Stalin González and former CNE rector Luis Emilio Rondón, and not too mention fully faux opposition figures like Bernabé Gutiérrez and Timoteo Zambrano—to tell the world that the opposition grabbed some seats in parliament, with no risk to his rule. 

Now, Maduro announced that constitutional reform will be carried out once the newly appointed National Assembly starts its term in January 2026. A new date to keep in mind for grassroots organizers and party operators, but above all, a new postponement of something that was supposed to be critical for the Bolivarian project: the communal state, which in theory will redistribute power in a wide network of communal cells that communicate directly with the executive power.

A shadow of what used to be, the chavista machinery is too exhausted and weak to attempt such a process at the moment, and mayoralties will likely be reorganized through another vote considering some of the new state rulers in charge. But there’s more: at least for now, the old form of the nation-state with three layers of territorial power—municipalities, states and national government—still works for Maduro in terms of power preservation. The communal state seems to be not only inviable, but unnecessary for him.