The factions of the Venezuelan opposition are trying to rebuild the roadmap against the clock that will allow them to participate together in the presidential elections of July 28, 2024. Their interests have not always coincided and their strategic visions have often clashed, but the coalition of parties critics of Nicolás Maduro is now in a momentous moment and has very little time to decide. The deadline to present candidates expires on March 25 and María Corina Machado, the candidate with the best chance of winning and disqualified by Chavismo, asked in a message spread through social networks for “trust” from her followers. The veteran politician assured that she will make “the right decisions” to lead the anti-Chavista currents to an electoral victory.
In his message, Machado has opened the door to alternative solutions to give continuity to the political initiative he is promoting with a view to the elections in case the institutional veto against him cannot be modified. Despite the almost total unanimity around María Corina Machado, there are activists, academics and minority parties that continue to promote the proposal of alternative candidates to replace her.
Manuel Rosales, governor of the state of Zulia, and leader of Un Nuevo Tiempo, has been publicly proposed by opposition leader Luis Emilio Rondón, one of his trusted men, as a possible candidate. Un Nuevo Tiempo, a party of the Unitary Platform, with a moderate social democratic line, is one of the few opposition political organizations that retains its card admitted to the National Electoral Council. Rosales had not registered as a candidate in the last primary elections on October 22.
Always insisting on the idea of party consensus, other sectors have proposed Eduardo Fernández as a candidate, a veteran Christian Social leader, presidential candidate in 1988, a fundamental leader of democracy, who in recent years has cultivated a Solomonic and moderate political line. “Those who want to capitalize on the national unrest cannot be arrogant people, possessed by revenge,” maintains Víctor Alvarez, economist, former Chavista leader and today an activist for change. His bet is Fernández.
“A good candidate has to be a promoter of the reunion of a country, put an end to conflict, have clear ideas of national problems, with ethical and moral ascendancy over the Armed Forces in a transition process, Venezuela needs a project of national unity” , maintains Mercedes Malavé, Christian Social opposition activist, general secretary of Unión y Progreso, the party that Fernández founded eight years ago.
“To recover its institutional recovery, it is necessary to advance a series of viable, realistic agreements, with the factors that are in power, based on the needs of the country, starting from the basis that the economic model of the ruling party has completely failed” , adds this activist. “I have worked with Eduardo Fernández on the need to generate a consensus candidacy at this political moment,” continues Malavé, who opposes this behavior to Machado's more intransigent attitude. “From a partisan point of view this looks bad. Our proposal for a consensus candidate includes other sectors of the country's life, a simple agreement around a governance project, fully interpreting the National Constitution, definitively overcoming the nation's rentier model.”
A couple of weeks ago, Eduardo Fernández traveled to Maracaibo – the second largest city in the country, capital of the Zulia state – to talk personally with Rosales, and strengthen, to the extent possible, an alliance between the opposition parties. “I came to meet with Governor Rosales to talk with him and ask him to use all his influence to prevent the forces of change from dividing,” he told reporters.
Although he has received the support of certain individuals and small parties, Fernández – after all a well-known personality – has, however, a modest projection in the polls and little political support. In the ranks of the campaign committee of Machado, the predominant figure of the opposition, there is total secrecy around alternative names, among which that of Gerardo Blyde, with extensive experience in negotiations, has also been mentioned.
Machado, in any case, is doomed to agree internally, because the unequal and extensive opposition field only has two electoral cards available to participate – that of Un Nuevo Tiempo and that of the Unitary Platform -, after the National Electoral Council invalidated 16 opposition political parties in recent days.
In the ranks of Machado's candidacy, his eventual replacement is an issue that, from the outset, causes displeasure and is immediately discarded. Some isolated voices have whispered the possibility of Magalli Meda, his right-hand woman on many political and logistical issues, with whom she sometimes appears portrayed. A member of Vente Venezuela, a party where she has enormous influence, Meda is little known in national opinion. Meda's name has circulated as speculation, and has also been denied, in principle because no one wants to talk about any name. What is being discussed is how to confront with arrests the thesis of “consensus” that her internal rivals are trying to impose, and that could take flight to confront each other in the field of democratic forces.
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