Venezuela After Chávez

One important thing to note about this result was its disproportional character. The Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (mud) opposition front received 56 per cent of the popular vote, while the alliance led by the ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (psuv) received 41 per cent. When that was translated into seats, however, the gap was much wider: 65 per cent to 33 per cent. The psuv has paid the price for its own failure to address the problems with the electoral framework. There are 164 seats in play, with 113 elected on a first-past-the-post basis and the remaining 51 on a list system. The mud did particularly well in large urban centres and the most industrially advanced regions of Venezuela, such as Zulia, on the border with Colombia, where its margin of victory was almost 24 per cent, and Miranda, where it bested the score for the psuv alliance by nearly 21 per cent. The opposition is very well organized in western states like Mérida and Táchira, which had been the site of major student protests in 2013–14. The margin of victory in Táchira was almost 37 per cent, which is quite remarkable. By contrast, the areas where the psuv and its Gran Polo Patriótico did well were rural constituencies, with an aged population and high levels of poverty and social marginalization. There is an important distinction to be made here, because in regions like Bolívar, Miranda and the Federal District, the popular classes defected in large numbers to the mud, while the rural poor in areas such as Guárico and Yaracuy remained loyal to the psuv. Insofar as the psuv did manage to hold on in certain regions, its lead over the opposition was quite small: 2.7 per cent in Yaracuy and 2 per cent in Guárico.

That seems to have been the case. It’s difficult to say exactly, because we don’t have the level of empirical data that we would need. There has been a decline in the quality of the psephological research being carried out in Venezuela. In the early 2000s, with the breakdown of the traditional two-party system, some excellent work was being done by academics, based on interviews and surveys. Over the last ten years, the research agenda has focused less on numbers and more on grand ideological debates; as a result, we’ve lost a great deal of insight into the ethnography of voters in Venezuela. There is very little information available about gender or age breakdowns in the support for parties. Another problem for researchers is that Venezuelans can be reluctant to say how they intend to vote. But the general picture would certainly lead us to believe that many erstwhile Chavistas voted for the opposition. The turnout was quite high—74 per cent—and the mud did well in former psuv strongholds. That shift in political loyalties may not be deeply rooted, as many people probably voted for the opposition on pragmatic grounds, or in a protest against the government. But as things stand, the psuv appears to have lost a very important part of its core vote. Nicolás Maduro remains President, but he faces a hostile obstructionist majority in the National Assembly, bent on removing him from office.

Under the old Punto Fijo two-party system, Táchira and Mérida were dominated by the Christian Democrats of copei. Their Acción Democrática (ad) rivals were more powerful towards the east, and around Bolívar and the Federal District. The psuv never really established a foothold in those western areas; to some extent it was less interested in doing so than in consolidating its base in the urban heartlands further east. Those Andean states were always considered to be quite remote from the psuv’s perspective. The failure of the psuv to put down roots in this region left a vacuum that allowed it to become a stronghold of the opposition. It contained some important university towns with large numbers of young people who were never really incorporated into the psuv or the Chavista project. This is an area where the Chavista government was very concerned about ties between Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries and the opposition, and a thriving cross-border trade in smuggled goods. The Colombian border has been subject to periodic closures, but it covers such an immense territory that the Venezuelan authorities can’t patrol it to the extent that they need to, and the Colombians have other priorities than the smuggling of goods across the border.