Venezuela votes: 'the mother of all stolen elections'

Nicolás Maduro has pulled off a breath-taking steal at the ballot box, but his power increasingly relies on foreign allies

Nicolas Maduro celebrates at Miraflores Palace after being declared the winner of Venezuela's election
Maduro celebrates at Miraflores Palace after being declared the winner of Venezuela's election
(Image credit: Alfredo Lasry R / Getty Images)

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%.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.