The victory of Nicolas Maduro in last Sunday’s presidential election with a narrow margin of 1.6 percentage points brings to the fore the threats posed to the Venezuelan revolution. This revolutionary process began after a combination of mass upheaval of the working classes and the revolt by the young officers and solders when within 48 hours they defeated the US-orchestrated military coup against President Hugo Chavez in April 2002. Chavez’s chosen successor, Maduro accepted the results of the election held after the death of Chavez in March 2013, and agreed on an audit as was demanded by the opposition. But the right wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a scion of the Venezuelan elite, refused to recognise the results.
The truth is that Capriles and other opposition leaders supported by domestic and international capitalist media has conducted a relentless campaign to try to discredit the National Election Commission (CNE) and had cried foul hours before the results were announced. The Chavistas have the government but the opposition has most of the wealth and income of the country. State TV has about six percent of the share of the media audience. The opposition has a clear advantage in the print and the electronic media, as they own most of these empires. Throughout the campaign Maduro had insisted that he would recognise the results even if these were against him by one vote. Capriles, on the other hand, had consistently refused to say he would do the same and refused to sign a document along these lines drafted by the CNE.
As Maduro pointed out in his victory speech, George W Bush was declared the victor of the 2000 US presidential election even though he got lesser votes than his rival (and there were widespread allegations of fraud, which were never investigated). Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor of Latin American studies, said in an interview with Al Jazeera, “In all elections, there are winners and losers; the US had no problem in recognising a victory of Felipe Calderon in Mexico in 2006 with less than 0.2 percent of the vote (this election was actually stolen from the left wing candidate Lopez Obrador), so I think it would be extremely foolish on the part of the opposition to try to create conditions of un-governability…” Even the former US president Jimmy Carter once admitted that Venezuela’s election process was the “best in the world.”
Alex Main, who is no socialist, and was an international observer in these elections, said, “It’s an extraordinary voting process, because not only you have the system of verification, where each electronic voting machine produces a paper receipt, which is then duly put into a sealed box., which can be audited after the process. But you have many audits throughout the voting process…” The so called ‘democratic’ opposition had no problems when Capriles won the governorship of Miranda by a slender margin or when the opposition won the 2007 constitutional referendum by the narrowest of margins (1.4 percent). The pattern is clear, whenever the oligarchy wins they accept the result, but when they lose, they cry fraud.
But the real causes of the Chavismo victory are the radical reforms during the Chavez government. An article in The Guardian says, “It was not just the successes of the missions that won Chavismo another seven years of the presidency. There were major improvements in Venezuelans’ living standards during the Chavez years…poverty was reduced by half and extreme poverty by about 70 percent. Real income per person grew by about 2.5 percent from 2004 to 2012. Unemployment was eight percent in 2012 as opposed to 14.5 percent when Chavez took office. These numbers are not in dispute among economists and other experts, nor among international agencies such as the IMF, World Bank or UN. But they are rarely reported in the major western media in their ongoing efforts to delegitimise Venezuela’s government…” Moreover, 25,000 doctors and paramedics were brought in from Cuba in exchange for the supply of subsidised oil. This transformed the health sector in Venezuela. These social programmes launched by Chavez provided everything from healthcare, subsidised food and free education at all levels.
The right wing opposition not only used violence against the Chavistas but also launched a systemic campaign of economic and political sabotage against the PSUV (United Socialist party of Venezuela). Maduro explained in his speech from the People’s Balcony at the Miraflores Palace, “Every state I visited there would be an electricity blackout, only for the power to be restored after I left.” Similarly, there was sabotage of the food supply chain, with speculation and hoarding. But the stark reality is that it was the narrowest of victories. The PSUV has shed 680,000 votes since the last election that Chavez had convincingly won on October 7 last year. It is a dire warning for the revolution. The revolution is up against an economic and social war of attrition on the part of the Venezuelan oligarchy supported by US imperialism.
From the point of view of the campaign, Maduro basically ceded to the discourse and the theme set by the opposition, where crime, inflation and issues of shortages were discussed. To enter that terrain of debate it was a disadvantage for him. But the real question is that the Venezuelan bourgeoisie still wields immense economic and financial power. They use it to destabilise and create anarchy for the PSUV government. There is also an accumulated discontent at the ‘Bolivarian’ bureaucracy. Introspection and self-criticism is needed in the party. But above all, the revolution has to be completed with the expropriation of the means of production, banks and financial institutions and the landed estates. The tasks of the revolution are also to take over the assets and wealth of the exploitative multinational conglomerates that have plundered Venezuela. This in itself will allow the revolution to deal with the problems of inflation, hoarding and speculation, which are eating away at the base of the support of the revolution amongst the workers and the poor. It is necessary to plan the economy in the interests of the vast majority of the toiling masses. In his victory speech Maduro said that he stood on the legacy of Chavez and was “building a socialist country.” The PSUV will have to match its deeds with its words to complete the unfinished tasks of the revolution. Otherwise, in the words of Louis de Saint Just, “Those who make the revolution half way only dig their own graves.” It is a question of now or never. The revolutionary war has to be fought to the finish.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]