Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is no stranger to accusations of fraud. He has faced them for his entire presidency, starting with his April 2013 triumph in the contest to succeed Hugo Chávez. It therefore came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition refused to recognize his latest claim to victory in the presidential election on 28 July. Since then, Maduro and his supporters have sprung into action to denounce what they see as a coup attempt that threatens Venezuelan democracy. They have been backed by many leftists around the world, who echo their narrative of a revolutionary government confronting an imperialist and fascist threat. Such claims have a firm basis in recent Venezuelan history. Over the past quarter century, the opposition has repeatedly refused to concede its electoral losses (the 2004 recall referendum, the 2013 presidential election) and made violent attempts to topple democratically elected leaders (the 2002 coup, the 2014 and 2017 guarimbas). Washington has imposed brutal sanctions aimed at bringing down the government and supported Juan Guaidó’s corrupt and illegitimate ‘interim presidency’ of 2019-23, during which he attempted to incite a military coup and called for a US invasion.

Yet if false charges of fraud have become familiar, this should not blind leftists to the simple facts that make Maduro’s claim to victory ‘difficult to believe’, as Chilean president Gabriel Boric put it. First, and most importantly, in the three weeks since the election, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has yet to publish any electoral results. The CNE has issued two televised bulletins, in which results were announced orally. The first bulletin came just after midnight on 29 July, approximately six hours after polls closed. The CNE announced that with 80% of the ballots counted, Maduro had won the election with 51.2% of the vote, while the leading opposition candidate Edmundo González received 44.2%. On 2 August, the CNE issued a second bulletin, announcing that it had confirmed Maduro’s victory based on 97% of ballots counted, with Maduro on 51.95% and González on 43.18%.

The CNE’s failure to publish detailed results, indeed any results at all, is in marked contrast to the past twenty years, in which results were published days and sometimes hours after polls closed. In the December 2015 parliamentary elections, which I observed, it took just over 48 hours to produce a clear breakdown. This year, the CNE says it suffered a massive hacking attack that prevented it from doing so, but it has not presented any evidence to back this up. The alleged hacking does not appear to have stopped the CNE from turning over tally sheets to Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, which Maduro requested on July 31 as part of an official review of the results. Even those sympathetic to Maduro have wondered why the CNE has not found a way to publish this information publicly.

The opposition’s record on democracy is far from spotless. Its leader, María Corina Machado, has long been the head of an intransigent far-right faction which adamantly rejected elections. Machado was a signatory of the infamous Carmona Decree: the document that was intended to consummate the 2002 coup against Chávez. She spent years advocating violent regime change while cozying up to authoritarians like Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei. Throughout this period, she and her allies were supported by the US and other Western governments. Now that it has become politically expedient, however, Machado has had a Damascene conversion to electoralism. The popular sectors remain wary of her and of the opposition in general.

Yet in recent weeks the opposition has published its electoral tallies on a website that purports to show the results from 80% of voting centers. It claims González won with two-thirds of the vote while Maduro received only a third. To assess the validity of these figures it would be useful to compare them to those of the CNE, were the latter available. Another option would be for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to release the tallies that its electoral observers collected from every polling station nationwide. It did this following the 2013 election to counter the opposition’s false claim that Maduro’s victory was fraudulent. Yet, to date, the party has refused to release any results. Outside observers have not been able to confirm the opposition’s findings, but scholars who conducted statistical analyses of the data claim that they do not appear to show signs of tampering. They also found the CNE’s results to be dubious, noting, for example, that rounding the tallies to the first decimal, as the CNE did in its first bulletin, would have been ‘arithmetically impossible’. The first bulletin also claimed that the gap between Maduro and González was 704,000, with 2,300,000 votes yet to be counted, yet at the same time it asserted that the trend toward Maduro was irreversible: an obvious inconsistency.  

A further piece of evidence that counts against Maduro is the explosion of protests across popular-sector barrios on 29 July, the day after the election. These were clearly spontaneous, as Machado had not called on supporters to take to the streets until the following day. Video evidence suggests that thousands, and likely tens of thousands, participated. This chimes with opposition tallies that ostensibly show massive rejection of Maduro in such areas. Equivalent protests have not occurred during any other recent instances of opposition mobilization, which have been dominated by the middle and upper classes.

A report by the Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social, titled Represión a los pobres en Venezuela, counts 192 protests in the Caracas region (specifically in the Capital District and state of Miranda, which includes much of greater Caracas), out of 915 total protests nationwide on 29 and 30 July. Of these 192 protests, the report finds that 80% occurred in barrios and popular zones, and that 75% of government repression against the protests took place in these same areas. This appears to support Yoletty Bracho’s assertion that the mobilizations ‘are not remotely guided by the Venezuelan right or by US imperialism.’

Maduro’s actions have been denounced by two international bodies that the state itself invited to observe the election. The Carter Center asserts that ‘Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.’ It indicts the administration and CNE on numerous fronts, including the failure to release disaggregated results; obstacles that prevented the vast majority of potential voters abroad (thought to number over four million) from voting; the disqualification of leading opposition candidates, who were ‘subject to arbitrary decisions of the CNE, without respecting basic legal principles’; unequal conditions for different candidates, with Maduro receiving significant positive media compared to González; and harassment of opposition campaign and staff.

On 13 August, a UN panel of experts, who observed the election at the invitation of the CNE, issued a sixteen-point preliminary report. Some of its findings are positive or neutral, such as the 59.97% participation rate, the peaceful environment on election day, the effective logistical coordination and the initially smooth electronic transmission of results. Yet, like the Carter Center, the UN report calls out the CNE for its failure to publish results – which, it says, ‘has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections’ – and concludes that those tallied by the opposition were trustworthy. It condemns government repression of protests from 29 July to 2 August, which it claims led to 20 deaths and 1,000 arrests. (The government itself has proudly declared that it has arrested more than 2,000 people for engaging in ‘terrorism’ following the vote.)

A careful consideration of the evidence, then, suggests that the election results are not just difficult but impossible to believe. Boric is not the only Latin American leader to have expressed major doubts. This has also come from three countries that have been close allies to Maduro’s Venezuela: Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. This bloc issued joint statements on 1 and 8 August asking the CNE to release the electoral returns and calling for restraint in the face of dissent. In recent days, Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro have gone further, with both leaders calling for new elections, with enhanced safeguards to ensure accountability and fairness. Petro has floated the idea of a transitional government bringing together officials from the Maduro administration and the opposition. On 16 August, Lula ratcheted up the pressure by publicly stating that Venezuela has ‘a very unpleasant regime’ with an ‘authoritarian slant’. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken a softer stance, typical of his hands-off approach to foreign policy, yet even he has refused to recognize the incumbent.

The fact that Lula and Petro have become increasingly strident in their public statements may be welcome news for the opposition, but it does not bode well for a quick settlement to Venezuela’s political crisis. If Lula and Petro were engaged in serious negotiations with Maduro over an exit strategy, the public would be unlikely to hear much if anything until an agreement had been reached. At present, it is hard to imagine that Maduro and his supporters in the Venezuelan state will accept any overtures to step down. They are unlikely to agree to an amnesty deal in exchange for leaving office, aware that such agreements are all but impossible to enforce when political conditions change. And they appear to enjoy the full support of the Venezuelan armed forces, as well as China and Russia. The regime appears well-positioned to ride out the crisis for as long as it lasts and then get back to the business of governing Venezuela.

Maduro’s recent actions belie his claims to be continuing the revolutionary legacy of Chávez. The current president has implemented increasingly neoliberal, and even rightwing, policies in an attempt to jumpstart Venezuela’s economy after years of sanctions: eliminating tariffs on many imports, lifting price and currency exchange controls, and a embracing de facto dollarization. His regime has also engaged in massive repression, which has targeted not only the center and right, but also the left. As with the protests of 29 and 30 July, it is the poor – particularly poor men of colour – who have borne the brunt. This is one of the reasons that the Communist Party of Venezuela has stood against Maduro and now fervently rejects his claim of victory.

Publicly, the US has taken a surprisingly cautious approach, pledging to follow the lead of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. The State Department issued a statement in the days after the election calling for transparency and the full release of the voting results. White House officials have been inconsistent: sometimes recognizing González as the rightful winner, sometimes refusing to take a clear stance. Biden at one point echoed calls for new elections before reversing this position. The current package of US and EU sanctions have already severely constrained Venezuela’s ability to raise funds or do business internationally. In October 2023, the Biden administration partially lifted Trump-era sanctions on the oil, gas, and gold industries as part of the Barbados accord negotiations, where the government and opposition agreed on a framework for the upcoming elections. Yet Biden subsequently reimposed oil sanctions in April this year after Machado was barred from running. These will continue for the foreseeable future, but to date there has been no serious talk of reimposing more debilitating measures.

The current US policy towards Maduro has two main causes. The first is the failure of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy launched by Trump and continued in the early days of the Biden administration, characterized by crippling economic warfare coupled with full US support for Guaidó’s attempted coup. These actions failed to dislodge Maduro. Instead, they prompted the Venezuelan military and ruling class to close ranks to defend him, while causing massive outmigration which affected the US and many Latin American countries (none more than Colombia, hence Petro’s leadership on the Venezuela crisis). This brings us to the second determinant. With elections looming, and Republican hysteria about the so-called ‘border crisis’ at fever pitch, Washington is in no mood to see hundreds of thousands more Venezuelans coming to the US in the next few months.

What comes next? Proposals for new elections or power-sharing have fallen on deaf ears, rejected by both the government and opposition. ‘We go to a second election’, Machado remarked sardonically, ‘and if [Maduro] doesn’t like the results, do we go to a third, fourth, fifth until Maduro gets results he likes?’ The prospect of the US lifting sanctions appears remote, and it may even introduce new ones, especially if Trump wins in November. This suggests that the modest economic recovery Venezuela has experienced in the last few years will be stalled or reversed. In conjunction with continuing government repression, there will likely be continued outmigration on a significant scale. Venezuela is unlikely to return to any semblance of ‘normalcy’ in the near future.

This debacle plays into the hands of the regional and global right, which cites it as proof that social-democratic policies are untenable in the twenty-first century. Want to raise the minimum wage, reduce poverty and inequality, or stimulate popular participation in the democratic process? Don’t even think about it, lest you end up like Venezuela. If the left is to counter this narrative, and defend the real gains of Chavismo during the 2000s and 2010s, it must give up on consoling fantasies and take a clear-eyed look at the country’s degeneration. That means resisting apologism for Maduro. Socialists, of any stripe, should not provide cover for a government that fixes elections and then clings to power by brutally punishing its poorest citizens when they protest.

Read on: Julia Buxton, ‘Venezuela After Chavez’, NLR 99.