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Bloomberg
The Venezuelan opposition has been boxed in. The socialist regime’s sweeping victories in elections marred by fraud accusations left opponents with scant hope of a fair 2018 presidential vote. International pressure has failed to move President Nicolas Maduro. Nor have months of street protests. Now, opponents are splintering over the basic question of whether the ballot box is the proper place to resist Maduro’s government.
“People will believe that neither peaceful protests nor voting can make any change, and so they will either resign themselves, many will try to leave the country or some, the more desperate, will turn to the last resort of taking up arms,†said Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University and former director of the Americas Program of the Carter Center, an election monitoring group.
Maduro presides over an oil-producing nation, once South America’s richest, that tumbled into ruinous inflation and hunger when crude prices plunged. In coming weeks, Venezuela must pay billions in maturing debt, but Maduro has increasingly turned to Russia to ensure the bills are paid and his power perpetuated in the face of bitter and sometimes violent dissent.
The aftermath of Sunday’s 23 governor races — and 17 regime victories — casts further doubt on opponents’ ability to remove the president through the machinery of democracy.
The alliance had approached the long-delayed elections warily after Maduro convened a legislative super-body to rewrite the constitution and hound opponents.
The regime responded by moving polling places into hostile areas and holding the vote open late into the evening. The results dramatically contradicted opinion surveys predicting an opposition landslide.
“The right deceived public opinion,†Jorge Rodriguez, a Caracas district mayor and campaign head for the ruling socialists, told reporters. “Venezuela demonstrated to the world yesterday how to execute democracy.†However the surprising results came about, the socialists’ democratic commitment has been called into question repeatedly.