Tag Archives: PDVSA

Venezuela

No matter who wins, Sunday’s elections will not be chavismo’s last stand

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Despite a late surge in the election campaign, socialist president Nicolás Maduro still faces a major defeat in this weekend’s elections for Venezuela’s National Assembly.

In a set of free and fair elections, it would not be difficult to predict that Venezuela’s long-suffering opposition would win a wide majority in December 6’s legislative elections; for many Venezuelans, despite marked disadvantages, the question is not whether the opposition will win, but by how much.Venezuela Flag Icon

That doesn’t mean the anti-chavista coalition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, Democratic Unity Roundtable) is anywhere near taking real power in Venezuela. No matter what happens, on December 7, Venezuelans will still wake up to president Nicolás Maduro, the oft-ridiculed successor to the late Hugo Chávez. Maduro only narrowly won the presidency in April 2013, following Chávez’s death, and Venezuela’s economy, already in dire trouble two years ago, has failed dramatically ever since.

What’s more, short of a massive supermajority, Venezuela will be gridlocked for the next three years when the next presidential election will held, at a time when its economy has reached crisis-level proportions of failure.

Dependence on oil revenues meant that even before global oil prices plummeted, Venezuelans were facing shortages of basic products, from food to medical supplies to toilet paper, and inevitable scenes of government-mandated rationing. Massive inflation, in tandem with an unofficially depreciating currency, has inflicted even greater economic pain for a country dependent on foreign imports, at least for those without access to US dollars. The economy is expected to contract by as much as 10% in a single year, making Venezuela’s the worst-performing in the world in 2015. Earlier this spring, conditions were so bad that chavista supporters took to throwing mangoes at Maduro at political events in desperate search of basic necessities. Maduro, meanwhile, has campaigned hard on Chávez’s memory and fear tactics that the opposition will reverse the government’s many social welfare programs.

Voters will be choosing all 167 members of the Asamblea Nacional (National Assembly), where the chavistas currently hold 99 seats, while the opposition coalition holds just 64.  Yet few observers believe that the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, United Socialist Party of Venezuela), the chavista party that for 16 years has governed the country in a way that’s blurred the line between political and governance activity, can win a majority in the elections. Datanálisis, one of Venezuela’s most respected polls, pitted the opposition coalition’s support at over 63%, with just 28% support for the chavistas in an October poll. Over at Caracas Chronicles, Francisco Toro argues that, for the first time in years, the December 6 elections represent the re-introduction of ‘politics’ to Venezuelan life.

But for a country where chavismo has now become so entrenched in its government and commerce, no one knows for sure exactly what the MUD’s margin of victory might be and how many seats it will ultimately procure. Under the dual voting system, most members are elected in single-seat districts, while 30% are elected by closed-list proportional representation. Rural areas, where the poorest voters support Maduro and chavismo more strongly for the generous social welfare programs introduced since 1999, are over-represented, as compared to urban areas, where the opposition’s support is strongest. A simply majority will give the opposition less power than a three-fifths majority or a two-thirds majority, with which the MUD could even forced a recall referendum against Maduro.  Continue reading No matter who wins, Sunday’s elections will not be chavismo’s last stand →

Venezuela

Ramírez demotion headlines Venezuela’s cabinet reshuffle

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Since 2004, Rafael Ramírez has served as the president of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), the country’s state-owned oil company, and since 2002, Ramírez has served as Venezuela’s energy/oil minister. Venezuela Flag Icon

That all changed on Tuesday, when president Nicolás Maduro announced a reshuffle of his government, the most significant since his controversial and narrow election in April 2013.

Ramírez, after Maduro and after Diosdado Cabello, the president of the Asamblea Nacional (National Assembly), was the most powerful of the chavistas remaining in government in the aftermath of Hugo Chávez’s death almost exactly 18 months ago. Since that time, Ramírez became, in addition to PdVSA head and oil minister, vice president in charge of economic affairs.

A longtime old hand within chavismo, he was among the most pragmatic and moderate of the chavistas. Ramírez may have run Venezuela’s oil industry into the ground, and he may have been as corrupt as anyone in Venezuela’s government. But he didn’t radiate the kind of socialist, true-believer aura of other leading chavistas, such as former planning minister Jorge Giordani and former foreign minister Elías Jaua.

In the Maduro era, Ramírez endorsed reforms, such as reducing the gasoline subsidy that keeps the price of fueling Venezuelan cars lower than anywhere else in the world and otherwise liberalizing the economy, including with respect to the massively overvalued bolívar. 

Asdrúbal Chávez, the cousin of the late former president, will become the next oil minister, while PdVSA engineer and executive Eulegio Del Pino, a close Ramírez ally, will be the oil company’s next president.

Though he was simultaneously named foreign minister, it’s hard to see how Ramírez hasn’t suffered a demotion for a country where 97% of foreign earnings derive from oil. As PdVSA head, in particular, Ramírez controlled the most enviable element of Venezuelan economic policymaking — he controlled the profits.  So while the move to foreign minister would be a promotion for many ambitious politicians, in Venezuela, it’s a way of sidelining Ramírez.  Continue reading Ramírez demotion headlines Venezuela’s cabinet reshuffle →

Argentina, Venezuela

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.

Venezuela

It’s Diosdado Cabello’s world, the rest of Venezuela is just living in it

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Venezuela, just over a month after its still-contested presidential election, has made global headlines in the past couple of weeks for its chronic shortages of everything from toilet paper to church wine, with rationing soon to begin in the large western state of Zulia.  Venezuela Flag Icon

That means that the country’s economic collapse is proceeding more or less as depressingly predicted — with oil prices stagnating, and with the state-owned Venezuelan oil industry’s production reducing, it means that the country has fewer and fewer dollars to fuel its increasing dependency on imported goods, a shortage that’s been exacerbated by the government’s somewhat inefficient system of auctioning off the dollars to importers and the fact that the Venezuelan bolívar is fixed at an artificially high rate.

That’s one of the reasons that Nicolás Maduro, even with the full force of a government that has excelled at blurring the line between the Venezuelan state and chavismo, only barely won election follow Hugo Chávez’s death and why his challenger Henrique Capriles is still waging a campaign in the court system, however quixotic, to expose voting fraud in April’s election that could well reveal that Capriles won the election instead.

Maduro’s loss weakened his already tenuous position within the ranks of chavismo, and the key power brokers under Chávez have largely retained their roles under Maduro, including Rafael Ramírez, the energy minister and the president of the state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), and Jorge Giordani, the former finance minister who remains the planning minister under Maduro.  Forget the fact that new policymakers could potentially reverse course on Venezuela’s economy or that Giordani, Ramírez and Maduro appear to be doubling down on the same policies that have led to Venezuela’s precarious situation — it shows that Maduro lacks the power to replace his rivals with ministers who owe their loyalty to Maduro.

But as the economy melts down, it isn’t surprising to see chavismo itself breaking down.  The first major breach came a couple of weeks ago, when a purported recording of a conversation emerged between Mario Silva, who hosts the popular, massively pro-chavista ‘La Hojilla’ television program, and Aramis Palacios, a Cuban lieutenant colonel in G2, the Cuban intelligence agency.  Silva is as much of a true believer in chavismo as anyone in the top circle of Venezuela’s ruling elite, so if Silva has such wide doubts about Maduro (at one point he says, ‘we are in a sea of shit’), imagine what the rest of the government thinks.

It’s also, of course, somewhat of an international scandal as well — though Cuban intelligence long worked hand-in-hand with Chávez and the Venezuelan government, what exactly was a pro-Chávez talk show host doing talking to a Cuban spook?  The link between the two countries became an issue during the campaign, with Capriles attacking the generous oil subsidies to Cuba that Chávez initiated a decade ago, and Maduro is widely believed to have been Havana’s top choice to succeed Chávez.

But the recording was most tantalizing with respect to Diosdado Cabello (pictured above) and his role in Venezuela’s future — no one has more power in post-Chávez than Cabello, including even Maduro. Continue reading It’s Diosdado Cabello’s world, the rest of Venezuela is just living in it →

Venezuela

Chavismo is a continuity of — not a rupture from — the petrostate

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I tried to plumb deeper into the role of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) before the election, and I argue in The Atlantic this morning that chavismo really marks more of a continuity with than a rupture from the petrostate clientelism that preceded Hugo Chávez — both in the 40 years of democracy in the late 20th century, as well as the era of military dictatorship that stretches back to the discovery of petroleum in Venezuela and its widespread export starting in 1918:Venezuela Flag Icon

Chavismo marked a rupture from this system in two ways. First, he diverted a larger share of Venezuela’s oil wealth to the poor than ever before — although the deployment of those funds was never incredibly efficient, nor was it without corruption. Secondly, he flattened the system through his own personality cult. PDVSA, the state oil company, has a stronger brand in Venezuela than the PSUV, the governing United Socialist Party. It was Chávez personally who doled out the gifts

It’s the second part that will make Maduro’s task especially difficult. Chávez would have been a hard act for anyone to follow, but Maduro is a bland apparatchik in contrast whose legitimacy, so long as he remains president, will forever be challenged by his narrow victory . He ran a largely defensive campaign, wrapping himself in Chávez’s legacy. Provided that his victory is upheld, it’s hardly a mandate forchavismo, let alone madurismo, but it’s not at all clear whether chavismo would ever actually work without Chávez, the personal embodiment of the latest iteration of Venezuela’s petro-state clientelism

That’s why, I argue further, Nicolás Maduro will have a very hard time maintaining the system Chávez developed, and why I think Venezuela is headed for more difficult times before it sees better times.

I argue that not only is Venezuela suffering from a sort of ‘Dutch disease’ on steroids, but that the petrostate mentality has skewed the relationship between the government and the governed:

As in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, resource wealth skews the link between the state and its citizens… and the traditional link between government and voters is turned upside down: instead of an electorate of taxpayers holding its leaders accountable for good government, voters look support politicians who can offer the largest slice of Venezuela’s oil wealth. That’s why domestic subsidies make Venezuelan gasoline prices the world’s cheapest, at just six cents a gallon.

That was true before and during the Chávez era, and it will certainly be true after Chávez. What seemed like a relatively mature democratic system before Chávez was always institutionally weaker than it looked from the outside.

I also caution that the opposition will have to do much more than just win an election in order to break the vicious cycle of Venezuelan (mal)governance:

But if Maduro’s victory is somehow overturned and Capriles becomes Venezuela’s next president, he’ll need a lot more than a change in expectations to put Venezuela on a firmer footing. The opposition’s hopes are based on what Paul Krugman might call the “hada de confiaza” — a Venezuelan confidence fairy.

Venezuela

A primer on PDVSA — and the interaction of oil and politics in Venezuela

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CARACAS, Venezuela — You’d think in Caracas that the governing party were the PDVSA, not the PSUV.Venezuela Flag Icon

But the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., functions as much as any other organ in Venezuela in service of the government, formerly headed by Hugo Chávez and now, Nicolás Maduro.

Indeed, a stroll through Caracas finds the PDVSA brand saturates the city — much more than the nominal governing party, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela). Here’s a PDVSA-branded hopscotch:

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PDVSA (pronounce it ‘pay-duh-vay-suh’) was founded in 1976 when then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil industry at the height of an oil boom the likes of which Venezuela had never seen. Venezuela’s oil industry began in 1914 when the first oil well was drilled in Mene Grande, in western Zulia.  It began exporting petroleum by 1918, and that soon eclipsed an economy once based largely on cacao and coffee — though cacao production was dwindling in the early 20th century, Venezuela exported more coffee than any country in the world other than neighboring Brazil.

Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter by the end of the 1920s — Caracas was known as ‘the gas station south of Florida.’ We think of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) as a largely Middle Eastern cartel today, but it was founded in large part in 1960 on the initiative of Venezuelan energy minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, who helped create it after reaching out to his ministerial counterparts in Saudi Arabia.

Through the next 40 years, Venezuela’s fortunes rose and fell with global oil price, but PDVSA remained relatively at arm’s length from the government — it paid income taxes and royalties to the government, as well as dividends (because it’s entirely state-owned).

This continued even after Chávez was elected — until 2002, that is, when Chávez attempted to take control of PDVSA, leading to a rebellion/coup attempt and a general strike among PDVSA employees later that year. Chávez, as it turns out, simply fired most of the offenders, and over the past 11 years, PDVSA has become essentially an arm of the government, which itself increasingly became an organ of chavismo.

So PDVSA employees today wear red, the color of chavismo, and over the past decade, PDVSA has been a direct contributor of funds to social programs, bypassing the formal channels of government — and also incurring its own liabilities (indeed, the IMF’s estimate of Venezuela’s public debt of around 51% includes PDVSA debts as well).

Whatever the benefits to deploying that capital for social welfare programs (and I’m not arguing for or against), it means there’s simply less capital to maintain production or develop new avenues for refining oil.

Rafael Ramírez, a loyal chavista, was appointed minister of energy and petroleum in 2002 and PDVSA’s president in 2004. If Maduro wins the election, it’s expected that Ramírez will stay in place — and so will continuity in oil policy under the Maduro administration. If Maduro replaces Ramírez, however, it could be an indication that he wants to shake up some of his predecessor’s policies.

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Oil proceeds represent around 95% of Venezuela’s exports, around 20% of its GDP and over 50% of the government budget. So what happens in the oil industry matters for what happens with Venezuela’s government and its economy. Continue reading A primer on PDVSA — and the interaction of oil and politics in Venezuela →

Venezuela

Capriles campaign optimistic with 48 hours to go — but can it win?

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CARACAS, Venezuela — The national headquarters of Henrique Capriles on Friday morning buzzed with optimism, with less than 48 hours to go before polls open in a race that many have judged hopeless for the opposition.Venezuela Flag Icon

In the wake of a rally in downtown Caracas last Sunday that brought hundreds of thousands of supporters to rally behind Capriles (without having to bus in massive numbers of supporters from across the country, as the chavista candidate Nicolás Maduro did in a similar rally on Thursday), and in the wake of a widely ridiculed comment by Maduro that a little bird told him that the spirit of Hugo Chávez blessed his campaign, Capriles campaign advisers are optimistic that their candidate has the momentum going into Sunday’s election, especially as voters realize the extent of Venezuela’s rapidly tumbling economy in recent months.

But Maduro, who is hoping to win a full term in his own right after the 14-year rule of his predecessor, Chávez, has everything else — the implicit support of the structure of the entire government, the armed forces, the state-owned oil company, plenty of resources, and significantly stronger media presence.

Though election law prohibits the publication of polls in the week prior to the election, polls are rumored to show Capriles closing a gap with Maduro — one such poll allegedly shows Maduro with a narrowing 55% to 45% lead, and Capriles’s internal polls show a massive swing as well. But whittling down Maduro’s lead and winning the election are two different things.

Leopoldo López, the former mayor of Chacao (one of five municipalities, and generally the ritziest, within Caracas) from 2000 to 2008, is one of the rising stars of the opposition. Chávez’s government barred López from running for office until 2014, a move that brought the censure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 2009, he founded Voluntad Popular, a centrist party that’s a member of the broad opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, Democratic Unity Roundtable).

‘I’m excited about change, I’m excited about the real possibility of winning, I’m excited about Venezuela opening a new cycle,’ Lopez said on Friday morning at Capriles headquarters. ‘The worries? What the government could do to put a stain on what will happen. This is not a regular election. This is not Bush-Clinton, this is not Candidate A versus Candidate B. This is a race against a state. I doubt there are other democracies where there are [such] clear differences in terms of the abuse of power. In this case, this is PDVSA, the state oil company, and the other powers of the state, against the people. But we have great faith the people will make the difference.’

The executive director of the MUD, Ramón Guillermo Aveledo (pictured above, with Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma and other top MUD officials at his right, rejected outlandish charges made in recent days at a press conference earlier today at Capriles headquarters as well.

Here’s the arithmetic. Continue reading Capriles campaign optimistic with 48 hours to go — but can it win? →

United States, Venezuela

Growing U.S.-Venezuelan commercial ties won’t lead to diplomatic thaw if Maduro wins

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CARACAS, Venezuela — I reported earlier today in Deutsche Welle on the state of U.S.-Venezuelan bilateral relations, which aren’t exactly gangbusters, if you’ve been paying attention for the past 14 years.

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The bottom line is: don’t expect acting president Nicolás Maduro, if he wins, to transform the chilly relationship between the United States and Venezuela.

To me, however, the more interesting factor is the commercial ties between the two countries, already strong throughout the reign of the late president Hugo Chávez, but now growing ever faster as Venezuela’s economy sputters and becomes increasingly import-dependent:

Venezuela’s obvious top export is oil – and the United States is its top customer, and that’s been true during both the Bush and Obama administrations, even when relations were at their worst. The United States purchases up to 900,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela – it officially funds around 40 percent of Venezuela’s export receipts. Given the complex financial arrangements between China and Venezuela and Venezuela’s subsidies to Cuba and to the rest of Central America and the Caribbean, US demand for oil has directly funded Chávez’s government, despite the rhetoric against the supposedly evil, imperialist gringo empire.

But precisely because of Venezuela’s dependence on the oil industry, the other sectors of its economy have atrophied, especially under the business climate during the Chávez era, when domestic and foreign businesses alike were subjected to ad hoc expropriation. That’s made Venezuela increasingly reliant on imports of staples, such as food and even fresh produce. Venezuela is even starting to import refined oil products, in part due to a gasoline subsidy that keeps gas prices at the lowest level worldwide.

Obviously, U.S. policymakers would prefer that Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate, wins the election. But given the incumbent advantages of the Maduro campaign, who has inherited the political infrastructure of his predecessor, Maduro’s election seems much likelier. If the Venezuelan economy does continue its downward spiral in the months and years to come, Maduro could well use anti-American rhetoric to deflect criticism from the failures of economic policy.

That means bilateral relations might get worse before they get better.

It’s uncertain whether that growing dependence would improve ties with the US – it’s easy to envision a fall in gas prices or a financial crisis result in even more brinksmanship in a Maduro administration as a distraction from harder budget choices.

Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Caracas, Venezuela, April 2013.

Venezuela

Venezuela marks coup anniversary in leadup to election

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CARACAS, Venezuela — On April 11, 2002, a large band of opposition supporters marched on Miraflores — the presidential palace — were met by chavista supporters, and exchanged gunfire meters from where Hugo Chávez and his advisers were sitting. A handful of protestors died and ultimately, in the following hours, Hugo Chávez left power for 47 hours. Right-wing businessman Pedro Cardona shortly took occupation of Miraflores, though his suspension of the National Assembly and failure to secure the support of Venezuela’s army slowly isolated him, and the Venezuelan army itself restored Chávez to power on April 14.Venezuela Flag Icon

On April 11, 2013, exactly 11 years later, Chávez’s supporters, having freshly mourned their fallen leader last month, will mark the final day of the snap presidential campaign in a massive rally for his successor, acting president Nicolás Maduro, throughout Caracas.

I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing what’s now become history, legend, and political fodder. It’s famously difficult to know just exactly what happened back in 2002, whether it was technically a full golpe (a coup d’etat) or not, the full role of the army in both pushing Chávez (briefly) from power and restoring him, who opened gunfire on whose orders, or even how many people died. But it came in a particularly tense year of transition, and it’s generally accepted that the coup — much like the general strike later that year — came as a result of Chávez’s ultimately successful attempt to assert control over the state-owned oil company, Petroleós de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).

The quintessential film on the subject, despite its pro-Chávez leanings, is a documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, shot by an Irish film crew that just happened to be in Miraflores working on a piece about Chávez when the April 11 events rapidly spun out of control.

Another account — one that I think gets closer to the heart of the matter, despite the fact that it’s written by someone who has decidedly anti-Chávez sentiments, comes from Francisco Toro, one of the authors of the Caracas Chronicles blog, which posits that both Chávez and his opponents, having played brinksmanship games for months, finally went too far, leaving the Venezuelan army in the middle to keep both sides from escalating the bloodshed that day.

Though it’s eleven years later, and there haven’t been any coup or near-coup attempts since, it’s not without some irony that the anniversary hangs over Venezuela tensely three days before voters decide whether to reward chavismo with another six years in office or to turn to opposition alternative Henrique Capriles.

There’s been some discussion in the Venezuelan media over whether the armed forces are being deployed to help get out the vote for the governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela), though military officials have backtracked from that claim in recent days. Capriles in an interview with El Universal earlier this week forcefully argued that Maduro and the PSUV should respect the election results, and cautioned that the armed forces would be responsible to ensure a peaceful transition. Though Chávez managed to commingle politics into every aspect of the state — from PDVSA to the central bank to state government — the military has retained relatively more of a patina of independence from politics than other state institutions.

Polls, which are not quite accurate in Venezuela, gave Maduro an edge in the leadup to the election, but that doesn’t mean Capriles is hopeless — he won a tough reelection as the governor of Miranda state in an otherwise dismal set of regional elections in December 2012 after placing just 11% behind Chávez in the October 2012 election — a better showing than any of Chávez’s rivals stretching back to 1998. Maduro is no Chávez, and since the 2012 presidential election, Venezuela’s economy has only gotten worse, and there’s been no appreciable improvement in the standard of living, some of the continent’s worst crime and power shortages throughout the country.

Because everyone assumes that Maduro will somehow find enough votes to win the election, no one really knows how easily Maduro and the chavistas would transfer power. Continue reading Venezuela marks coup anniversary in leadup to election →

Venezuela

The policy case for Maduro in Venezuela

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In my earlier companion piece today, I discussed the policy case for electing Henrique Capriles as the next president of Venezuela in an attempt (however vain) to separate the emotional divide in Venezuela from the policy rationales that underline each candidacy.Venezuela Flag Icon

Separating the policy from the personal is even more difficult in the case of Nicolás Maduro, however, whose campaign at every turn has been one massive embrace of Chávez, not only as a predecessor, but as nearly a deity in his own right.  So far, the Maduro campaign begins and ends with ‘Chávez,’ and there’s no guarantee that once elected, Maduro would wield a sufficient personal mandate even to take sufficient control of Chávez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

There’s frustratingly little substance as to what Maduro (pictured above) would do with a six-year presidency, let alone whether he could come to dominate a governing regime with a handful of key powerbrokers, such as energy minister Rafael Ramírez, finance minister Jorge Giordani, and national assembly president Diosdado Cabello, none of whom will easily step aside from their relative and significant fiefdoms in government.

But, as I asked with respect to Capriles earlier today, what policy arguments should motivate a moderate voter who enthusiastically supported Chávez in 1998 but who’s become increasingly disenchanted about the reality of Venezuelan governance and who may be flirting with supporting Capriles — is there a rational case for supporting Maduro over Capriles?  Continue reading The policy case for Maduro in Venezuela →

Venezuela

The policy case for Capriles in Venezuela

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Tuesday kicks off the official start of the campaign in Venezuela for the presidential election on April 14.Venezuela Flag Icon

It’s a little artificial, given that the campaign really began unofficially the day that Hugo Chávez died and certainly both the pro-chavismo and opposition forces have been preparing for such a campaign since Chávez left for his final, unsuccessful round of treatment in Cuba.

Not surprisingly, much of the pre-campaign has been waged on visceral and emotional lines — the pro-/anti- chavismo debate in Venezuela has become inextricably so linked to personalities and identity politics that it’s often hard to step back and articulate the policy rationale for each candidate.  Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate, has even stepped up his attacks against acting president Nicolás Maduro, in a much more insistent (even populist) tone than he ever took in his 2012 presidential campaign against Chávez.

That seems likely to intensify over the next 13 days.

But to the extent it’s possible to put aside the emotional in favor of policy, what policy arguments should sway, say, the moderate voter who enthusiastically supported Chávez in 1998 and well into the last decade but who has doubts about the performance of the government in recent years to make the jump to support Capriles (pictured above) and the broad Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD)?

Continue reading The policy case for Capriles in Venezuela →