Maduro set to tighten grip over Venezuela as Guaidó denounces 'fraud'
Nicolás Maduro looks set to tighten his grip over Venezuela as the country held legislative elections that some believe effectively mark the end of Juan Guaidó’s US-backed campaign to topple the South American strongman.
The bulk of Venezuela’s beleaguered opposition is boycotting the contest for seats in the 277-seat national assembly, calling it a sham designed to lend Maduro’s authoritarian regime an air of democratic legitimacy.
“The dictatorship doesn’t intend to hold an election, it intends to annihilate a nation’s hope,” Guaidó, the opposition
leader, said on the eve of a ballot he denounced as a “fraud”.
But for Maduro, the vote is a chance to wrestle control of the last state institution not commanded by his ruling Socialist party by packing it with allies. “The day has come to rescue Venezuela’s parliament,” his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, told reporters after polls opened at 6am on Sunday.
Losing control of the parliament – the last official bastion of opposition to Maduro – would deal a further blow to Guaidó’s flagging crusade, which began when he declared himself Venezuela’s legitimate interim president in January 2019.
A coalition of more than 50 governments, including the US, UK, Germany and Brazil, recognised that claim on the basis that Guaidó was head of the national assembly and Maduro’s 2018 reelection had been illegitimate.
But Guaidó, who is among those boycotting the election, will no longer hold that position after 5 January, when the new parliament is sworn in, and his support base, both at home and abroad, appears to be collapsing. Last week, Guaidó’s envoy to the UK announced she was resigning, telling the Financial Times the future of his leadership was “unclear”.
“That is symptomatic of the fact that the coalition around Guaidó is really crumbling,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for Crisis Group. Gunson said he doubted foreign governments would immediately ditch Guaidó after the election and that he would “trundle on for a while”.
“But unless he is able to reinvent himself in some way I think the Guaidó plan has clearly failed – and Maduro has every right to a victory lap. From his point of view, and it is hard to disagree, he’s seen the back of both Donald Trump and Guaidó. Nearly two years on [from the start of the campaign] there has been no progress – in fact, if anything Maduro is more in control, certainly politically, than he was before.”
Observers say that control will undoubtedly be reinforced by Sunday’s election, in which candidates include Maduro’s flute-playing 30-year-old son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, or Nicolasito (little Nicolás) as he is better known.
Gunson said the opposition boycott, the manipulation of Maduro’s government and the absence of impartial observers meant the election result was a foregone conclusion and the national assembly doomed to becoming a rubber-stamp parliament. “The government is guaranteed a very large majority,” he said.
For Maduro, the problem remained that “Venezuela’s economy is collapsed, the country is extremely isolated internationally, and there is a lot of discontent within his own movement”.
“So it’s not like he is home free,” Gunson added.
On Saturday, Maduro promised that what he called the “Day of Victory” election would herald “a new era of recovery and genuine progress for all”.
Guaidó urged voters to stay at home, saying: “Today that is the best way of repudiating this fraud”.