CARACAS.- Venezuela is going through a crucial moment in its political life, since the opportunity for a change of government is totally feasible in theory, after the opposition managed to unite around the figure of María Corina Machado in the primaries last October. However, pessimism is what hovers around the possibility that the upcoming presidential elections in July can be fair and transparent.
After the trauma of the electoral nominations, Machado has returned to campaigning with tours of the territory of the Caribbean country. The opposition leader, who is politically disqualified from holding public office for 15 years, a measure illegally imposed on her by the regime, insists that they will follow the electoral route to achieve clean and free elections, and affirmed that the parties of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), the main opposition coalition, will continue to press for a level playing field.
“We are participating and we are advancing on a route from which they are not going to remove us, it is the route for clean and free elections,” said Machado, reported VOA.
According to the opinion of analysts, Venezuelan society aspires to political change and is aware of the importance of voting as an instrument to achieve that desire. The problem is that the regime always manages to tip the balance in its favor.
For the Venezuelan analyst Carmen Beatriz Fernández, president of the firm DataStrategia and specialist in political science and electoral campaigns, the next presidential elections in July will not be the exception.
“The Venezuelan presidential elections of 2024 will not be free or fair… On the contrary, I believe they will be the worst electoral conditions in the last two decades,” said Fernández, reported El Nacional.
He explained that “since Chavismo came to power, it progressively tilted the field of the electoral game, so that one of the two teams (the one in power) had the slope in its favor. Each election the field tilted a little more.”
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But, he stressed that “the question” will be to see if “even with very unfair and very unfree electoral conditions, the very massive will for change of Venezuelan society can prevail and dislodge Chavismo from power.”
The analyst highlights the importance of the opposition primary elections, which “caused a political earthquake in the country,” in her opinion, since they “changed the variables of the game” for both the regime and the opposition itself.
Next Thursday, April 18, is the deadline to make substitutions for the candidates that will appear on the electoral card. The PUD must announce who will be the consensus candidate to replace Edmundo González Urritia, a diplomat who assumed the PUD nomination provisionally due to the impossibility of nominating Corina Yoris, the one designated by Machado to replace her due to her political disqualification.
That same day, the United States, which has been pressuring the regime for electoral guarantees, is expected to say what the future of the economic sanctions it maintains on Venezuela will be, as the license granted in October 2023 that allowed the sanctions to be made more flexible expires. Department of State on Venezuelan oil and gas.
The US has stated that it could tighten sanctions again if the Maduro regime does not show progress in offering democratic guarantees for the presidential elections.
Fernández warns that “regardless” of the future of the sanctions, the regime still has a lot of control in various aspects of the electoral field, such as the schedule, and the surprise factor “which it has always known how to use very well.” Maduro “flees forward when he is in trouble, and on July 28, he might be no exception.”
Source: With information from El Nacional / VOA
