Venezuela’s election result: victory or fraud?

Clearly, Venezuelans want democracy, but Maduro is naturally authoritarian and can’t give it to them.

Helder Ferreira do ValeThe author is a professor of international relations at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. On June 28th, President Nicolás Maduro, in power for 11 years, was announced winner of a historical election. With a record participation and most opinion polls foretelling the victory of his contender, Edmundo González, there are indisputable indications that Maduro frauded another election.

As a typical illiberal regime, Maduro tightly controls Venezuela’s electoral authority, which granted him a third mandate for the next six years. After a long record of rigging election results, this time Maduro declared himself the winner without presenting any details about the vote count.

The main leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, in her first statement after the elections, revealed that only 40% of all the vote records had been given to the opposition before the suspicious results were announced. And based on these records, Corina indicated that González received about 70% of the votes, which made him the winner of the race.

Amid growing unpopularity, Maduro in recent months has committed a series of abuses of election rights and norms, such as excluding from the ballot list Corina, denying the vote rights to the almost eight million Venezuelans living abroad, as well as intimidating and even ordering the arrest of close aids of Corina and González. Despite not being able yet to end the dictatorship, this time the opposition supported by extensive public mobilization has succeeded, among other things, in making very evident Maduro’s flagrant rejection of any democratic process.

Several governments in the region, including the ones from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay, were quick to question the official election results. As a response, Maduro broke diplomatic ties with these countries the day after the election. Yet, he was delighted in having autocratic China, Russia, and Iran embrace his suspicious victory.

The new political stalemate in Venezuela puts the country in a similar scenario as in 2018. That year’s presidential election was equally fraudulent, leading the National Assembly, back then under the majority control of the opposition, to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the official president of Venezuela. This happened even though Maduro had been sworn in as president. A solution to the problem came as the opposition negotiated with Maduro the celebration of a new presidential election in 2024 and the National Assembly put an end to Guaidó’s interim government.

This year’s election comes as a result of long negotiations with the participation of the international community, leading to the signature of the 2023 Barbados Agreement, which Maduro has been systematically violating. Since then, Maduro has caused geopolitical turmoil in South America by illegally annexing a portion of Guiana’s territory to Venezuela.

Maduro, who inherited the presidential office from Hugo Chavez after his death in 2013, gave continuity to an illiberal regime inaugurated in 1999 as a movement that promised Venezuelans socioeconomic transformations. Chavez soon turned his movement, dubbed the Bolivarian Revolution, into a popular project that gradually captured the Venezuelan state.

After 25 years, the result of this failed project has been catastrophic. The regime became increasingly dysfunctional because Maduro, unlike Chavez, lacked public backing and faced a serious economic crisis, which was exacerbated in 2017 by U.S. financial sanctions. During his governments, millions of Venezuelans left the country to live in exile.

In 2014 and 2017 Maduro repressed broad demonstrations showing that the government was ready to crush any dissent. Despite repression, the opposition prevailed in 2017 winning the majority of seats in elections for the National Assembly. This event brought hope that the regime was losing support and that a fresh turning point for the opposition was about to arrive. Together with the 2024 election, these cumulative experiences suggest the international community must find ways to support the Venezuelan opposition to force a negotiated transition to democracy.

Attempts to destabilize the system through international sanctions and spark a popular insurrection are not the best solution for Venezuela. Maduro has shown resilience to a breakdown of the regime mainly because he uses oil revenues to buy allegiance to the regime particularly from the military. Keeping the regime afloat in this way, the best approach to a transition in Venezuela is to internationalize the domestic civic mobilization.

This international movement would envision the formation of a democratic regime among Latin American countries. In practice this means that governments, regardless of ideological color, only recognize democratically elected administrations. This is exactly what is happening when the present leftist governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico overcame the inclination in the past to immediately recognize the legitimacy of a leftist government and are requesting Maduro to release the vote records of this year’s election.

This international pressure through various levels of diplomatic engagement in Venezuela could enable civilians to confront the authoritarian regime while also attracting certain members of the military forces. This would possibly split the army between hard and soft-liners in terms of repression and defense of Maduro’s regime, offering the door to a negotiated transfer.

On the next days, the course of the opposition’s future in Venezuela will be sealed. With the growing number of protests across the country denouncing electoral fraud, it’s possible that the regime will be more violent. Clearly, Venezuelans want democracy, but Maduro is naturally authoritarian and can’t give it to them.