Navel-gazing is taking a rest in Argentina in this winter holiday week with eyes turned elsewhere – to the Olympics in Paris, to the recent series of game-changers in the United States elections and most immediately tomorrow’s presidential voting in Venezuela, on which this editorial will focus. Elections which cannot be viewed in isolation from a region on which they will have a profound impact. Under the late Hugo Chávez and the current incumbent Nicolás Maduro, oil-rich Venezuela has been a more potent bridgehead for China, Russia and Iran in the region than its dependent island of Cuba so that voting out that regime would be a vindication of the Monroe Doctrine just two centuries after its proclamation, restoring the Americas to the Americans.
This change of regime is not as inevitable as the opposition advantages of 20 or even 30 percent in the opinion poll surveys might suggest – absolutely no guarantees against mega-fraud or an arbitrary cancellation of the election on the part of an intolerably authoritarian, corrupt and inefficient presidency which painted itself into a corner years ago.
Yet the chances are greater than ever for both internal and external reasons. These are the very first elections in which the opposition has neither been banned nor called a boycott against fraud while unifying their candidacy. At the same time Maduro’s support on the external front is significantly weaker with the leftist presidents of Venezuela’s two main neighbours, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Gustavo Petro of Colombia, now finally joining the international call for electoral transparency – it is probably no coincidence that it should be the presidents of neighbouring countries expressing their second thoughts most vocally because it would be their borders facing the influx of millions of Venezuelans fleeing an endless continuation of a Maduro presidency.
That presidency does not only hinge on Maduro’s personal decision to accept or reject the popular verdict or tamper with the electoral process, as widely assumed. Venezuela might be a virtual dictatorship but this does not necessarily make Maduro a dictator – his bravado serves to conceal his serving as a raucous frontman for a kleptocratic military elite whose voice is also the former Congress Speaker Diosdado Cabello. Above all, Maduro is in
hock to a military top brass who might well opt to continue the years of repression but of which they could also be tiring and seeking civil peace. Allowing tomorrow’s election to go ahead and respecting its result is thus not entirely Maduro’s call.
And neither is the exit strategy which in many ways is the key to consolidating a change of regime beyond tomorrow. Paradoxically enough, it is the wholly undemocratic exclusion of by far the most popular opposition politician, María Corina Machado, which has made a transition possible. Tomorrow’s election is already flawed as a result of this flagrantly arbitrary ban but had she been allowed to run and win, precisely those uncompromising stances which have made Machado the most popular opposition voice would have made it impossible for her to negotiate without losing all credibility. That problem is not shared by the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia – as a diplomat with public service under the current regime (indeed he was the Venezuelan ambassador here in Argentina during the first years of Hugo Chávez between 1998 and 2002) he is doubly equipped to negotiate. Against him is age (at 74 he is not much younger than the hapless Joe Biden) and the image of a future surrogate presidency for which Argentina’s previous government is hardly the best precedent. But for negotiating a transition González Urrutia is ideal.
That transition still lies in the future, depending on tomorrow’s election being allowed to happen and producing the logical result, with its outcome uncertain. Impunity for Maduro is clearly repugnant and even more for some of his henchmen although there seems to be a broad consensus both at home and abroad that it is a lesser evil to the continuation of a virtual dictatorship which has expelled millions of citizens and reduced the economy to a fifth of its former size. Much will also depend on the scale of any amnesty due to the danger of the excluded blocking the process with desperate moves.
By the end of the year both Venezuela and the United States could have very different presidencies, altering perspectives for Argentina – reason enough for the libertarian government to pay rather more serious attention to foreign policy than President Javier Milei’s cavalier anti-diplomacy.
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