There are many interesting things to be said about this election, one being that it really wasn’t a fight over ideology. Maduro, who had been directly named by Chávez as his preferred replacement, ran as the Chavista candidate. But in a way so did Capriles, who pledged to be a better administrator of the society Chávez left behind.
Already during his previous campaign, Capriles drew sharp criticism from Venezuela’s oligarch irreconcilables for basically running as a third-world socialist. He repeatedly compared himself to Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, saying that he would keep in place all of Chávez’s social missions, which deliver health care, education, housing, childcare and other services to the urban and rural poor. Capriles, who in 2002 supported the failed US-backed coup against Chávez, even announced that he was a “Bolivarian,” an act that just a few years earlier would have been as unthinkable as Dick Cheney declaring himself a member of Code Pink.
During this election, Capriles went even further. He named his campaign team after Simón Bolívar and said he would not only defend the misiones but create new ones. He promised to dramatically increase salaries and pensions and began to work phrases associated with Chávez into his speeches, even copying symbols of the Bolivarian Revolution into his campaign paraphernalia. In other words, the close results of the election can’t be interpreted as a rejection of Chavismo, since Capriles ran promising to consolidate the gains of Chavismo, saying that he, and not Maduro, was be a better executor of Chávez’s legacy.
Had he won, Capriles undoubtedly would have quickly reverted to his earlier coup-supporting incarnation and began the dismantling—or at least try to. But the genie let loose by the Bolivarian Revolution won’t be easily put back in the bottle. Over the course of the last fourteen years, Chávez presided over both a radical expansion of the public debate—including redefining democracy to mean social democracy—and a radical expansion of who has access to that debate. He helped set in motion a process by which millions of people who had been formally excluded from political decision-making today think of themselves as protagonists, including thousands, perhaps upward of a million, of Colombian migrants, many of them domestic workers and laborers, who were brought out of the shadows by an immigration reform that the US would do well to imitate. That Capriles’ only ticket into Venezuela’s political arena was to accept this new reality suggests that, whatever the future may hold, the winner of last week’s election was Chávez himself.
More than this, the fact that so many Venezuelans seemingly made a conscious, considered decision to switch their votes confirms what supporters of Venezuelan democracy have been saying for years: people voted for Chávez because they wanted to vote for Chávez, not because they were gulled, duped, bribed or intimidated into doing so.
That said, what happened? Maduro was expected to win handily, by about the same percentage Chávez did in October. There aren’t reliable exit polls that might provide a sense of voter motivation, but, as I have written earlier in The Nation, Chávez’s electoral support largely fell into two broad constituencies. The first included Venezuelans involved in social movements—the vibrant organizations George Ciccariello-Maher writes about in his terrific new book, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution—whose activism makes Venezuela one of the most democratic countries in the world. The second was made up of unorganized voters, many from the middle class, who didn’t necessarily think they were building twenty-first century socialism but believed, all things considered, that their lives were better as a result of Chávez’s redistributive policies. My guess is that it is this second group, concerned with crime, violence and corruption that, unimpressed with Maduro, swung to Capriles.
I think Venezuelan democracy has been dead for much longer, it just became official with the recent events...
