Venezuela’s opposition leader Machado sees path to victory in Maduro’s sham election | Opinion

Despite the fact that Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has resorted to all kinds of dirty tricks to rig the July 28 elections, I don’t recall ever seeing Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado as upbeat as when I interviewed her earlier this week. And I’ve talked to her many times over the past two decades.

At first, I thought she was putting an act, because Maduro has already banned her and Venezuela’s best-known opposition leaders from running, censors the media, and is taking drastic steps to prevent millions of likely opposition voters from going to the polls.

But judging from a few things she told me, such as her stand against a potential government decision to suspend the elections, she seems convinced that the opposition can win the elections against the odds.

“We’re seeing an entirely new process,” Machado told me by Zoom from Caracas. “People are reacting with an enthusiasm we had never seen before. It’s unbelievable.”

Last week, during a visit to the poverty-stricken Andean state of Trujillo, the second largest stronghold of Maduro’s Chavista movement, it took her five hours to drive a distance that usually takes two hours “because people were joining us in cars, motorcycles, trucks, on horseback, walking. It was crazy.” The same is happening wherever she goes throughout the country, she added.

Machado admitted that the opposition will face an uphill battle to win the elections.

Maduro’s tricks

The Maduro regime had banned her from running after she won an opposition primary with 92% of the vote in October, and later blocked the registration of Corina Yoris, the substitute candidate she had appointed to run in her place. Now, Machado and the opposition coalition she heads are supporting a new substitute candidate, 74-year-old former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.

In addition, the Maduro regime has prevented an estimated 4.5 million voting age Venezuelans who live abroad from voting in the elections, as well as another 5 million people in the country who have not been able to register. About 10 million Venezuelans in a country of 28 million won’t be able to vote, she said.

But while recognizing that “this election won’t be free nor fair,” Machado said she does not want Maduro to suspend it. Several opposition leaders have voiced fears that, facing polls that show him way behind, Maduro may use a pretext such as a lingering border conflict with neighboring Guyana to cancel the elections.

“Each day that goes by, it’s becoming more politically costly for the regime to block this process, because there’s an unstoppable (opposition) force,” she said. “We may already have 80% of the vote, if not more.”

Machado told me that “it’s very important” that there be “a presence of competent electoral observation missions, such as those of the European Union, the panel of experts from the United Nations and even the Carter Center” in Venezuela for the elections.

The Carter Center, the European Union and the United Nations are currently evaluating whether to participate. The Maduro regime has said it will not invite an Organization of American States mission.

Cause for optimism?

When I mentioned to Machado that Maduro may never leave power unless he and his aides are given assurances that they won’t go to prison, Machado said, “We have been very clear that this will be a process of reunification, where there won’t be revenge nor vendettas.”

My impression after the interview was that if Machado felt that Maduro will get away with holding a sham electoral process and declaring himself the winner, she would be calling for a voters’ boycott, and would ask foreign electoral observation missions to stay at home in protest.

But she is doing exactly the opposite, and gives the impression of genuinely waiting for the July 28 election. I don’t know if she’s bluffing when she talks about an alleged 80% anti-Maduro vote, but her enthusiasm about the mood of her country suggests that there may be a ray of hope for Venezuela.

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