Winning the opposition primary elections with such an overwhelming majority as that achieved by María Corina Machado has made laughable the condescending formulas and the admonitory, patriarchal tone with which the bosses of the Venezuelan opposition and their “independent” analysts used to refer to her.
The demographic sample consulted is enormous and the unanimity of the ruling in favor of Machado reveals the inanity, and the vileness!, of a delirious combination of electoral scenarios that for months frantically entertained Maduro’s sycophants, eternal guests on feminized opinion programs. of private radio and television in this country with prior censorship. The favorite argument was a sophistry regarding the disqualification that, violating the Constitution, weighs on Machado. This deprivation of Machado’s political rights emanates from a poisoned aguachirle that the regime distributed and gave to his competitors to drink.
“Let’s be realistic,” they argued, “to compete with Maduro the opposition candidate must be legally qualified. María Corina is going to win the primary as Secretariat won the 1973 Belmont Stakes Derby: 17 lengths ahead of the field. But she is disabled. Maduro, on the other hand, is a dictator eat the faut and for nothing in the world will he lift Maria Corina’s disqualification.”
The proposal of the “realist” spirits was to design a protocol that would arbitrate the replacement of María Corina with her surrogate, someone who would be suitable for Maduro. If he still had objections to the substitute and arbitrarily disqualified him, the contested person would abdicate in favor of another miserable person and so on, until he found the poor devil who acted as the dictator’s sidekick in a shameful electoral nonsense.
This sly martingale had already worked in the 2022 regional elections and was based on the automatic and iteration endorsement of the votes of a disqualified person in the account of a drinker. The premise is to consider the arbitrariness of the disqualification as legitimate, again and again, without getting involved in an inconducive string of challenges, until defeating it due to exhaustion.
This feble “antidote” to Maduro’s tyranny seems like something out of a novel by South American dictators like Tirano Banderas but, believe it or not, it is still the only electoral strategy of the opposition.
Each opposition party participated in the primaries confident that the apportionment of votes would not give a significant advantage to the poll favorite. Even if Machado won the primary, they reasoned, he would need to negotiate the support of the other parties that, united, could always tie her up short, in favor of Maduro. Without the “machinery” of Democratic Action, Nuevo Tiempo and Primero Justicia, María Corina would not be able to fight Maduro with any chance of success. There were moments when the adversary seemed not to be Maduro but Machado.
The above gives rise to the suspicion that the Democratic Action of the Mephistophelian doctor Ramos Allup, together with Primero Justicia – the formation of Henrique Capriles and Julio Borges – and Nuevo Tiempo, party of the governor of the State of Zulia, Manuel Rosales, pointed out by many of be colluding with the regime, are at the current moment, whether they like it or not, more than petty parties of Maduro. Be that as it may, all conventional wisdom about the Venezuelan opposition was blown up on October 22.
Among the unforeseen consequences of the primaries is the revelation, without extenuating circumstances, of the null capacity of mobilization of the partisan “machines”: these do not go beyond producing videos of the main street of a provincial town, full of extras carried. Its creativity does not yet surpass the electoral slogans of the old parties during the last third of the 20th century. The primary candidates trotted around gesticulating like Carlos Andrés Pérez would do.
On the other hand, no one in Venezuela today better embodies the Latin American existential dilemma between democracy and tyranny than the dyad of opposites made by María Corina Machado and Nicolás Maduro.
Independence, Machado’s willingness to act before, for example, the Mexico agreements, is underlined by the fact that the opposition commissioner parties in these negotiations are the same ones that Machado has just defeated handily in the primaries. Despite their degree, they are the first called to enforce the ruling, expressed in the agreements, to lift Machado’s disqualification.
The United States conditions the relaxation of its sanctions on Maduro, sunk in the basement of all the polls and with serious problems in the current account, opening himself to elections that, if they were clean, he would inevitably lose next year to a female supporter. of the market and privatizing Petróleos de Venezuela.
The socialism of the 21st century made oil, nationalized fifty years ago, its emblem and its driving force. Today, Venezuela has seen the public company that was its pride looted. Ironically, there may be no electoral promise more powerful than offering it for sale.
None of this was foreseeable at the beginning of this year. But as things are going, it has become too late for Maduro to escape the electoral fatality that the intrepid, and until recently, no perseverance of María Corina Machado has managed to imprint on the current stretch of our history.
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