Venezuelans once again immerse themselves in elections holding their breath. The new D-Day is just around the corner, in a month. The presidential elections are scheduled for July 28, marked by the desire for political change, after 25 years of Chavismo, which most polls take for granted. On the street, each person creates a scenario in their head tailored to their uncertainties. On social networks they replicate the massive videos of the tours of the opposition member María Corina Machado, disqualified from competing and turned into a political phenomenon, which moves the votes for her replacement on the card, Edmundo González Urrutia, who also tours towns and cities. cities.
The duo, Chavismo’s candidate Nicolás Maduro, who aspires to a third term after more than a decade in power, is trying to keep up with them. Although Venezuela may seem to some to be a constant deja vuhas now entered into new waters, after a deep and prolonged political crisis in which Chavismo finished chiseling out its most authoritarian side. There is no doubt that this has become an unprecedented contest for the country.
Delia Palacios, 70 years old, with a bundle of flyers from candidate González Urrutia in her bag, assures that, according to her calculations and her wishes, change is finally coming. “You will remember me when we win,” says the retired teacher while she rests in a square in the center of Caracas. “We are going to change this cornered life. They have already hurt us too much,” she comments with an anxious smile. In addition to the flyers, she carries cardboard with the image of the electoral card with which she has taught a few people how to mark their vote for González Urrutia. In her cell phone memory she saves the videos of Machado’s tours of the week. She shows them excitedly, interspersed with one or another mocking meme about the presidential candidate. With the 70 years that she has been around her, she says that she has lost her fear and assures that “even the Chavistas are going to vote for her”, that is, for him, González Urrutia, Machado’s candidate.
In front of Delia, Gabriela Martínez and Marian Miralles, in their 30s, cautiously confirm that they are going to vote. The current political moment in Venezuela drags an open generational wound like a tail. They breathed tear gas and lived through the violence of the anti-government protests of 2014 and 2017, led by young people and students fiercely repressed by the security forces. Since then, they say, every day they wake up with the idea of leaving the country, but on Wednesday of this week they are still talking after work in the Plaza Candelaria in the center of the capital. “We are going to vote with a familiar feeling that the same thing can happen again. We have lived in a loop, this is the only thing we have known. But perhaps now there is a larger mass willing to change,” says Gabriela, who left university after the protests because she could not pay for it. “We only have ourselves to rely on,” she adds. And Marian answers that she is tired and disappointed.
Although the opposition leader gathers followers on her tours in the interior of Venezuela, the campaign takes place in Caracas with a relatively low profile, as if they were not a presidential election—and precisely these, with that defining character for the future of Venezuela—that are going on. to happen in just a month. There are no posters, slogans or t-shirts with candidates’ faces repeated ad infinitum, as usually happens in any electoral preamble. Among the little opposition electoral propaganda, Chavismo has tried to colonize the space. They have installed fences against Machado. Although gasoline is scarce, vending machines spew pro-Maduro advertising on their screens. Insistent advertisements have been paid for on the main digital platforms. They have added salt and cans of tuna to the CLAP bags and this is discussed in popular communities as an electoral novelty. They have filled the walls of Caracas with paintings that say Future —the narrative with which Maduro seeks to position itself— accompanied by a heart made with a fingerprint like the one that Venezuelans must register on voting day. They have also begun to invoke the specter of fraud and the opposition boycott, the advanced move with which Chavismo has previously fertilized the ground.
![A man dressed as 'Supermoustache', a representation of Maduro as a superhero, on the streets of Caracas, on June 18.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/AYAV3LGZKRD5TAYKJFBVE3E2IY.jpg?auth=0e24072054ed10e70f6566fde8c85c324b33bfed82ea0d32fa7788ba91e5eeb7&width=414)
While Gabriela and Marian talk, María Gracia de Freitas, a few meters away, has set up her informal stand to sell candy and complete “the political work.” With other women, she reviews the lists of witnesses they have managed to complete for the centers in her parish. A few days ago, the National Electoral Council thwarted the game of voter protection that the parties of the Unitary Platform have been putting together for weeks. With a resolution that violates electoral law, it established that witnesses can only exercise their role in the center where they vote. “Before, we had too many witnesses. After the CNE decision, we were left with half, but in three days we already have them all again,” says the 64-year-old woman. They have even found some for new centers created for this election that operate in facilities controlled by the Chavista machinery. These are centers with only one voting table about which the electoral technicians of the opposition have warned of a challenge for the defense of the votes on July 28.
While selling candy, María Gracia teaches her clients how to vote in the middle of the square at 6 in the afternoon, full of children running around, grandparents playing dominoes and men exercising. She will be in charge as a Voluntad Popular activist of one of the largest schools in that sector, but these days a new fear began to haunt her. “They are capable of claiming to be winners, but María Corina Machado is not going to remain silent,” she warns. “I’m afraid, but we have to take risks, because it’s good that we let them win without having won.”
What will come after July 28 is what worries María Auxiliadora Fernández, 55, another resident of the area who since voting has joined the political work in favor of the opposition. “This has been an almost covert campaign,” she comments, with around twenty elections of experience and a family tradition of local politicians as references. She is a designer, but survives as a taxi driver and this choice is especially crucial for her. If the change of Government is not achieved, she says that she will end up, as she already did, part of her family in Spain, a country of which they are citizens. “We are already very worn out,” she admits. “But there are things that we cannot forget that day from what we have experienced these years, like that they have tried to humiliate us over a bag of food or that we have been afraid to express ourselves even in a WhatsApp group.”
With popular support confirmed by most polls and on the streets, the opposition is approaching the presidential elections with cautious enthusiasm. Chavismo maintains a clear willingness to stay in power. The final stretch will be full of crossroads, as has been the previous journey. Since the guarantees for this process were negotiated in Barbados, many of them stranded on the path of good intentions —such as the observation of the European Union—, and which have been recomposed with the pressure of the international community, especially from Colombia and Brazil, and the direct negotiations that the United States is carrying out with the Maduro government, with its hand on the lever of the oil sanctions. With barely a month left until the elections in Venezuela, uncertainty is the only scenario.
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