Venezuelan opposition again following the siren song of an electoral boycott

After achieving remarkable unity in embracing the electoral path in 2024, the Venezuelan opposition is once again in the midst of a divisive battle over whether to participate in the upcoming regional and legislative elections, with leader María Corina Machado returning to her previous message of electoral boycott. This is rarely a good strategy for confronting an authoritarian government but is especially misplaced in the current international context.

It is not hard to understand the push for a boycott. After considerable sacrifice and resilience, the Machado-led opposition won the July 28, 2024, presidential elections in a landslide, only to have the Maduro government clumsily claim victory and violently repress protesters. For those who thought a decisive defeat at the polls would get the Maduro government to hang its head and hand over power, this outcome was deeply frustrating. For them, this failed electoral effort only reinforces the idea that “a dictator can’t be removed with votes.”

However, there is another way of looking at electoral events in an authoritarian context. They can be seen as battles in which an authoritarian power is confronted and forced to play politics. The great sociologist Michael Mann says that mistakes and miscalculations are key to revolutions. When emerging forces of power articulate and challenge, existing powers need to read these new forces and decide how to react. Of course, doing so can create internal divisions and often leads to significant mistakes.

Indeed, this is what happened in 2024. The Maduro government never imagined they would lose in a landslide. They thought that if they put enough obstacles in their way, the opposition would eventually boycott. And if the elections did happen, the margin would be close enough that with the usual set of manipulations they could eke out a victory. Instead, they got caught flat-footed and had to recur to a series of embarrassingly inelegant measures that did not even convince their regional allies. July 28 was a “stunning election” that did not lead to a transition; but it did leave Maduro and company degraded and humiliated.

To use a football metaphor, electoral events should be seen as scoring opportunities. Most do not succeed, and even a thundering shot on goal can be stopped by a well-positioned goalkeeper. But putting the ball in the area repeatedly will eventually lead to a mistake and yield a goal. To get the other side to miscalculate, you need to obligate them to play. And to obligate them to play, you need to play yourself.

If the choice were between a unified boycott and unified participation, one can imagine the first strategy being effective. But that is not possible. At minimum, there will be a co-opted “opposition” recruited by the regime to run. As well, even in the face of a call to boycott, they will be joined by other opposition politicians who simply are not willing to sit it out. Thus, the real decision is between a partial boycott and a strategy of unified participation.

This is not a call to set aside Machado’s leadership. She is arguably the only person who could lead a unified opposition effort to participate in the regional and legislative elections. Of course, she and her advisors have already come out strongly against participation. But she has changed course on this issue before and has the legitimacy to do so again. Participating in regional and legislative elections does not logically contradict the justified position that the July 28 presidential elections be respected. Rather, campaigns and positions won can be used to amplify those demands.

Machado should embrace these elections if she wants to maintain relevance. We can go to recent history to see the likely course of her current strategy. Juan Guaidó enjoyed soaring approval ratings when he led the effort at creating an interim government in 2019. However, over the months and years his audacity came to be seen as fumbling impotence. He and Voluntad Popular mobilized a boycott of the 2020 legislative elections and discouraged voter participation in the 2021 regional elections. By the end of that year his approval ratings were roughly the same as Maduro’s and his only real audiences were in Madrid, Miami, and Washington D.C.

This time, as well, it won’t take long for beleaguered Venezuelans to tire of empty promises that the end of the Maduro regime is near. And it won’t be long before they start suspecting that Machado’s calls for electoral boycott are more about maintaining her leadership of the opposition than about a viable strategy for change.

The current international context is more adverse for the Venezuelan opposition than at any time during the 12 years of Maduro’s presidency. The irresistible dream of many Venezuelans that Donald Trump’s return to office would mean the return of the maximum pressure campaign of 2019 and 2020, has been dashed by Trump first cancelling the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the U.S. and then sending envoy Ric Grenell to negotiate directly with Maduro regarding political prisoners and return migrants.

This really should not surprise, given that the only times Trump mentioned Venezuela in his campaign was in talking about crime, and in particular the Tren de Aragua. In Marco Rubio’s first statement of the new “America First” foreign policy, the word “democracy” did not even appear. It is likely we are only seeing the beginning of a new U.S. approach to Venezuela that does not have democracy as one of its pillars.

What is more, international attention is elsewhere. The United States’ politicians are consumed by their own crisis of democracy. Europe is reeling from Trump’s unilateral capitulation to Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and what it means for their own future. Thinking the Venezuelan opposition can cajole the international community into prioritizing Venezuela is a significant misreading of this context. Nobody is paying attention to Venezuela, and a partial boycott of regional and legislative elections will not change that. It will reinforce it.

In contrast, going to an election against the odds, heroically mobilizing the people, and loudly denouncing the flow of obnoxious, authoritarian measure the government surely will take, could generate a modicum of international attention and sympathy. More importantly, it could mobilize the population, put the Maduro coalition under pressure, and preserve or capture important spaces of political power.

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