She is not on the ballot, but she is in the campaign. She is not a presidential candidate, but the candidacy of the Venezuelan opposition depends on her.
Maria Corina Machado, the most visible and socially influential opposition leader in Venezuela ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, has become the main threat to President Nicolas Maduro’s re-election bid, despite being banned from holding public office for 15 years.
That political veto, ordered by a government-run Comptroller’s Office, prevented his face from appearing on the ballot, while Maduro’s face is printed on up to 13 occasions. But it did not curb the opposition’s aspirations to try to wrest power from the president, who is seeking a third term and faces his greatest electoral challenge since taking the reins of the country.
Experts and observers have said that the opposition has a real chance of winning in these elections and that chance depends on a campaign in which the opposition coalition has insisted on one message: voting for its candidate Edmundo González is voting for María Corina Machado.
The 56-year-old former legislator was supported in the opposition primaries in October last year with more than 92% support and now accompanies the 74-year-old former diplomat González on his tours around the country. Until a few months ago, he was a complete unknown in local politics.
His slogans of “freedom” and “until the end,” alluding to the complete change of model he promises for Venezuela, have echoed throughout every corner of a country plagued for years by a deep economic and social crisis.
The leadership position that liberal politics has achieved in recent months is attributed by analysts to the vacuum left by other opposition leaders – some of them also adversaries of Machado – who fled the country after the failed insurrections of 2014, 2017 and 2019 that the opposition promoted to seize power from President Maduro.
Machado’s message of change has raised hopes among many Venezuelans who had been resigned to living amid recession, rampant inflation, meager wages, recurring failures in public services, and the painful migration of their families.
Despite the differences and fractures that have torpedoed the ambitions of the Venezuelan opposition from within for years, the former legislator has managed to unite a large opposition bloc on this occasion. The voices that confronted her on other occasions have this time given in to support her.
The moderate discourse that Machado adopted last year when he returned to the electoral path after years of calling for a boycott, allowed him to attract the less radical sectors of the opposition.
But her figure has also been surrounded by symbolism, said Michael Shifter, an academic and former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a political think tank based in Washington. The opposition leader represents the “symbol of resistance to the regime” after facing the ruling party for almost two decades, which has earned her the admiration of her followers who see her as the “instrument for a transformation in Venezuela.”
Although Venezuelans know that Machado is not the opposition candidate, but Edmundo González, many openly admit that they will go out to vote on July 28 to support her.
“There is no education. There are no hospitals… It’s all a queue. We have to vote for change,” said Angel Reyes, a small businessman in the western city of Maracaibo, expressing his support for the former legislator.
As he cleaned a piece of white cheese in a plastic container, Reyes, 45, confessed that he has his hopes pinned on the opposition, but admitted that if Maduro were reelected, he would begin to think about migrating, just as millions of Venezuelans have done in recent years.
“We’ve been working on the same plan for 20 years and haven’t seen a change. What do you want? 20 more years to finish it off in a hurry… (insult)?” he reproached.
The attacks from the ruling party against the former legislator have intensified in recent months. Some of her closest collaborators and leaders of her Vente Venezuela party have been arrested in situations that the opposition has denounced as harassment by the authorities.
During the electoral campaign, which formally began at the beginning of the month, Maduro hardened his criticism of Machado and at a recent public event referred to her, without mentioning her name, as a “decrepit old woman of the ideology of hatred and fascism.” He accused her of wanting to “fill the country with hatred and violence.”
In a kind of rebound effect, the attacks and the endless obstacles that the government has imposed on Machado to move around the country “have served to catapult her,” said Felix Seijas, director of the local pollster Delphos, who identified her as a “political phenomenon.”
Gone are the years when the industrial engineer, daughter of a wealthy steel businessman, challenged the ruling party’s power in 2004 through the civil organization Súmate by promoting an unsuccessful recall referendum against the then president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013). Following that initiative, she and other Súmate executives were brought to trial for conspiracy.
A year later, he again challenged Chavez on a trip to Washington for a White House meeting with President George W. Bush, an open adversary of the late South American leader.
In 2010, she formally entered the political arena to compete in the legislative elections and won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies as the deputy with the most votes.
His differences with the socialist ruler widened upon his arrival at Congress, where he even interrupted him in the middle of an annual message he was giving to the country and complained about the expropriations, claiming that this policy represented theft.
Before becoming the opposition leader who attracts support from the public, Machado tried to be the candidate of the then known Democratic Unity Roundtable in 2012. She came third, behind the leader Leopoldo López and the former governor Henrique Capriles, who faced Chávez in the elections that year, in which the president achieved his third reelection before dying of cancer in March of the following year.
Machado’s political setbacks did not end there. In 2014, the ruling party majority in Congress stripped her of her immunity as a deputy after she accepted a position as Panama’s “alternate representative” to the Organization of American States (OAS) in order to denounce alleged crimes committed by Maduro.
Months later, the pro-government Comptroller General’s Office banned her from holding public office for a year, alleging that she had omitted income from a food voucher in a sworn statement of assets. The measure prevented her from participating in the 2015 parliamentary elections, which were won by the opposition.
In addition, in 2014 he faced legal proceedings alongside Leopoldo López – who was arrested that year and fled to Spain six years later – and other leaders of the most radical wing of the opposition for promoting street protests against Maduro, which left 43 dead.
For the next nine years, he stepped away from the front lines of politics and concentrated on consolidating the centre-right organisation Vente Venezuela – which had been founded in 2012 – and on supporting the various protests and initiatives of sectors opposed to Maduro. He kept a secondary profile until his return in 2023.
Her ambitions to become the opposition’s presidential candidate after winning the primaries were countered by the new political disqualification imposed by the Comptroller’s Office, this time for 15 years and with allegations of corruption. But it will be the votes on Sunday that will tell whether this veto on participating as a candidate clouded Machado’s political horizon or whether it was ultimately an incentive for those who want a change in Venezuela.
____
We invite you to visit us on the new NY1 Noticias channel on WhatsApp. There you will find the most relevant news about what is happening in New York, as well as other coverage about the rest of the country, Latin America and the world. Click here in this link to access the channel. We thank you in advance if you become one of our followers and express your reaction to what we publish with an emoji.