Venezuela votes: 'the mother of all stolen elections'

Latin America is no stranger to stolen elections, said Andrés Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, but the one we've just witnessed in Venezuela must be "the mother of [them] all".

In most rigged elections, authoritarian rulers award themselves "an extra 1% or 2% of the vote". To Venezuela's strongman Nicolás Maduro, that's chickenfeed. There was so much dispute over his re-election in 2019 that his close ally, Vladimir Putin, had to send over Wagner mercenaries to secure his safety. And, last week, Maduro outdid himself as he "fabricated as much as 40%" of the vote to claim victory.

He did it by the simple expedient of getting the National Electoral Council – which he controls – to manipulate the voting data, said La Nación (San José). Without showing any voting records, the NEC simply declared Maduro to have won 51%, even though exit polls suggest his opponent, Edmundo González Urrutia, received well over 60%.

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Maduro has now been in power for 11 years, said Alejandro Velasco in The Nation (New York). A former bus driver politically trained in Havana, he rose to become vice-president under Hugo Chávez, the left-wing populist whose electoral victory in 1998 brought an end to Venezuela's long-held reputation as Latin America's most stable and prosperous liberal democracy.

Chávez's "Bolivarian revolution" proclaimed a new dawn for Venezuela's dispossessed, and his massive subsidising of goods and services did indeed cut the extreme-poverty rate by some 15%. But Chávez's time in power was also marked by widespread corruption, economic mismanagement and a deepening of Venezuela's dependency on oil exports. And, as a result, when a dramatic plunge in oil prices occurred in the early 2010s, the oil-dependent nation plunged into a downward spiral.

And Maduro, his handpicked successor, elected by a hair's breadth on Chávez's death in 2013, has made things far worse, said the Centre for Preventive Action (Washington). His resort to printing money to tackle the crisis doomed the country to years of rampant hyperinflation. All this, combined with crippling economic sanctions imposed by the US, has so impoverished the nation that 7.7 million people – about 25% of the population – have emigrated. Yet still he clings on.

But for how long, asked Rebecca Hanson and Verónica Zubillaga on The Conversation. Middle- and upper-class Venezuelans have often taken to the streets in protest before, but this time the protests have seen the mass participation of low-income and working-class Venezuelans, too. Chavismo seems to have lost the support of the very people it claims to represent. Statues of Chávez are being torn down across the country, said Alejandra Carvajal in Semana (Buenos Aires); on social media even soldiers can be seen joining the protests.

It's all driving Maduro into a manic fury, said Juan Diego Quesada in El País (Madrid). He is accusing every critic of being a fascist; he has even challenged Argentina's right-wing president, Javier Milei, to a fist fight. Yet he has powerful friends to prop him up, said Alexandra Schwartzbrod in Libération (Paris). Venezuela is a key country: strategically placed at the top of the South American continent, it has the largest oil reserves in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia. If the US and its allies have condemned his stolen election, Putin "and his club of dictators around the world" – China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba et al – have all applauded it, said Anna Zafesova in La Stampa (Turin).

Maduro has notably strong links with Russia. Venezuela was one of only 11 nations at the UN to vote in favour of Russia's annexation of Crimea; it plays host to Russian strategic bombers and warships; it has received investments from Russia's state oil giant, Rosneft. And Maduro has the unconditional support of an even more crucial ally – China, said Carlos Eduardo Pina in Nikkei Asia (Tokyo). To bolster Maduro's grip on power, Beijing has in recent years transferred around $14 billion to Caracas. Even so, his position is precarious. The next few weeks will tell whether it's President Xi or the protesters who will decide his fate.