Since the 1998 presidential election that brought Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution to power, Venezuela has held 38 votes, including presidential, regional, parliamentary, constituent assembly, and municipal elections; primaries; and referendums. The rise of a revolutionary project through the ballot box and not bullets kicked off a democratic Bolivarian tide that swept Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere. Now, 25 years after Chávez’s first election, and more than 10 years into the erosion of his political legacy under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans will vote for their next president on July 28.
Western media have depicted this highly anticipated election as marking what looks to be the end of the Bolivarian period. In this volatile terrain, sociologist Ociel Alí López’s Elecciones en Venezuela 2024: ¿Qué pasará? Escenarios y sus causas analyzes what is at stake in the race between incumbent Maduro and opposition frontrunner Edmundo González Urrutia. The book offers a valuable resource for interpreting the social, cultural, and political game playing out in this election. It also does the near impossible in an electoral scene as polarized as Venezuela’s: present a critical, independent analysis, funded by the author himself.
López presents his argument in four chapters. His analysis does not give predictions or prognoses, but instead offers a precise and impartial view of the electoral outlook. In the introduction, López poses the key question: what will happen to the loser? In any event, in a scenario where any participant opts to not recognize the results of the election, López argues, they will become enemies of the Venezuelan people.
Chapter 1 celebrates Venezuela’s agency in 2024 to channel its political problems via elections, rather than resorting to military force. Beginning in 2017, the opposition for years promoted foreign military intervention, a demand taken up by the parallel government created in 2019 under the leadership of Juan Guaidó. The governing party, on the other hand, from 2017 to 2023, denied opposition leaders political rights and intervened in the historical political parties Acción Democrática and Copei, as well as opposition parties such as Primero Justicia, Voluntad Popular, and the Communist Party, which is critical of the current government.
This chapter also addresses how the 2024 U.S. presidential election has cast a shadow over Venezuelans. While in office, the Trump administration supported militarized opposition actions, such as an attempted coup on April 30, 2019. This event, widely broadcast in Western media, came amid brutal sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of State and under the watch of the new special envoy to Venezuela, Elliot Abrams, who from the White House had been tied to the 2002 failed coup against Chávez.
This section of the book also describes the situation on the ground, where polls project that González will win. Indeed, as María Corina Machado—the hardline opposition leader for whom González is seen as a surrogate—campaigns across the country, the opposition is getting deep into the countryside to places it did not have access to in the past. Chavismo's active social participation on the ground has been reduced and changed by economic, energy, health, and educational crises. Additionally, Chavista voters’ participation in elections is conditioned by the bureaucratic militancy of the governing party, the PSUV, through institutions ruled by the government and economic dependence.
Meanwhile, under the assault of overwhelming sanctions, the Venezuelan oil industry is almost deactivated. Latin America politics has shifted to the right with figures like Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, marking backslides in hard-win rights. In this polarized context, the likelihood of all parties recognizing the official election results is challenged by the fact that both leading contenders have already declared themselves winners in advance, accusing their opponent of plans to carry out fraud.
Chapter 2 tackles economic issues. Venezuela has experienced drastic economic growth in comparison to the worst period of the economic crisis from 2015 to 2017. Now, however, money flows from cryptocurrencies, gold and other minerals, and remittances, not from oil. This chapter demonstrates the new reality of a Venezuela characterized by individual entrepreneurship. With sanctions in place, this new economic growth tends to be spurred by peoples’ everyday efforts to meet their own needs. In 2023, the Biden administration eased sanctions with a view to the 2024 elections, although these measures were reimposed in April. Nevertheless, the sanction relief, which allowed companies like Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s ENI to restart operations, reactivated the oil industry, now producing at a level of 900,000 barrels per day.
The Maduro government’s economic program, however, has been one of neoliberal shock. Inequality has grown. Today, we need to understand Venezuela as a country without oil heading its economy. PDVSA, the state oil company, is in debt. Although the opposition has proposed plans to radically expand private participation in the oil industry, constitutionally the state cannot sell off PDVSA. One looming question is, if González wins, what happens to the sanctions? In that scenario, López says, Venezuela will see eminent changes but political instability. Circulation of the dollar has resurrected the Venezuelan economy, but free markets combined with a lack of state support puts the population in a precarious position.
Chapter 3 explores cultural questions. Backed by popular sectors, Chavismo appeared back at the turn of the millennium as a political identity incorporated into a cultural identity. Chávez’s movement established the idea of the “popular” to critique political and cultural structures ruled by an oligarchic elite that historically held state power and administered oil wealth. María Corina Machado Zuloaga, López explains, comes from the historically richest family in Venezuela, linked to the slave trade and the Guipuzcoana Company, an 18th-century colonial trading company.
In the last few years, the “popular” has been restructured. Now, high classes have gotten closer to the excluded and abandoned population to obtain their political support, and thus a new popular cultural identity is emerging. This context, López suggests, has given way to a historic cultural clash mediated by the economic crisis and the impoverishment of the state. The sifrino and sifrinaje (colloquial terms used to describe high-class identities and aesthetics), which López previously studied in his 2015 ¡Dale más gasolina! Chavismo, sifrinismo y burocracia, is now taking over the terrain abandoned by Chavista forces due to PSUV state hegemony, configuring a new identity to establish a new popular subject and enact a new political force. Venezuelan migration has also reconfigured identity. Meanwhile, new oligarchs and a bourgeois produced by links with the government, known as enchufados, represent a new face in class struggle.
Finally, Chapter 4 zooms in on the main figures in the election. Machado, who holds the opposition leadership after winning the primary elections in November 2023 with 93 percent of votes, represents the extreme right wing of the opposition. During the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, she joined other opposition figures in signing the decree that dissolved the constitution and the state. In 2019, she requested that the Organization of American States activate the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance to trigger military intervention in Venezuela. Barred from running for office, Machado is supporting Edmundo González in her stead and is campaigning all over the country for him.
López argues that if González wins the election, Machado will reach power as a national leader in the shadows. He suggests that, in this scenario, Chavista forces could clash with extreme right forces and lead to a civil war. To build a solid government and national peace, a Machado-backed González government should pursue positions that are moderate and tolerant.
Maduro, for his part, as López describes, has overseen a process of dismantling the state, with state funding for health care and education reduced, social assistance abandoned, the economy dollarized, and a deep energy and electricity crisis. The liberalization of the Venezuelan economy has led to some economic improvements, but also a new process of inequality.
Maduro is not offering new scenarios to the Venezuelan population. A González victory, on the other hand, would bring eminent changes. To recuperate from the serious energy crisis, state assets like the state electricity company would be sold off, as could be the case with the state telecommunications company CANTV, another important asset. A drastic privatization program is at the top of the opposition’s campaign. With a possible Trump reelection around the corner, another variable to take into account is what kind of sanctions might be leveled in the case of a Maduro victory.
Elecciones en Venezuela 2024: ¿Qué pasará? Escenarios y sus causas is an important resource for scholars and other observers interested in current Venezuelan and South American politics. Venezuela has suffered years of implosion and segregation. Against the backdrop of a country in tatters, held together by its people, this book—written in Venezuela—offers a critical perspective for reading the electoral landscape. In an enterprise of independent discourse, López exhibits the electoral tactics and political power games of both the government and the opposition, without taking sides.
As Colombia and Chile turned to the left in their most recent presidential elections, the media in these countries held up Venezuela as a mirror, warning of the dangers of a radical left in power. For Venezuelans, the questions are different. What happens when the revolutionary state decays and neoliberal politics and economics take control? How can we make sense of political scenarios characterized by extreme polarization? What happened to the Venezuelan political project of emancipation and sovereignty? Ociel Alí López offers an objective voice within left circles in Venezuela and South American countries, opening a door to think beyond polarizing binaries. This book establishes a new vision of the present, which also extends to the future.
Pedro Varguillas Vielma is a poet, writer, and researcher.
