Seduce the abstentionist and overcome the fracture, the opposition challenge in Venezuela

After trying to reach Ithaca by way of public proclamation, the Venezuelan opposition launches an “old” strategy: the ballot box. Four years of electoral boycott have passed and now they must convince their supporters, who are the majority according to polls, that voting is worth it, while they try to overcome their perennial fractures.

The task is complex. When next Sunday arrives and Venezuelans must decide whether to deposit their digital ballot to elect governors and mayors, they will have to overcome years of opposition insistence on the lack of sufficient conditions to consider the elections as free and with guarantees.

There will be many who, after hearing the same speech from their leaders, choose to abstain, the same decision they have made since 2017.

The alternative, the one that the former deputy slipped countless times Juan Guaidó and that permeated part of the detractors of the Government of Nicolás Maduro, it was a hypothetical international intervention that would overthrow the Executive.

That intervention never came – and it never had a chance – but its promoter did not respond to a citizenry that was left blind, without a leadership that would indicate an alternative direction. With one option blinded and the other unfeasible, they were immersed in a dead-end dilemma.

“The vote is the weapon of the fight”

In these elections, former councilor David Uzcátegui made the leap to a major candidacy, after a fight between opponents. He aspires to be governor of the central state of Miranda, which is home to part of the Caracas metropolitan area, and is convinced that “the vote is the weapon of the citizen’s fight.”

“That is over, the population is not in that wave. Neither the 70% who reject the Government, nor the 10% believe in that story, “says the candidate promoted by the Fuerza Vecinal party about Guaidó’s proposals.

To seduce voters, he sees a change in attitude necessary because “the traditional opposition has made a big mistake: believing that, because Maduro is unpopular, the opposition is popular.”

“That is not true; To earn a vote you need to have a presence in the community, help the community, be in good times and bad. The traditional opposition one day says no to vote, another that yes, another that no, and that incoherence is taking its toll ”, he considers.

Uzcátegui was not the only opposition candidate in Miranda, a state traditionally detractor of Maduro, but was competing for the vote with Carlos Ocariz, backed by two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles.

The competition unleashed Kafkaesque scenes with their sympathizers fighting for the same vote at the gates of the subway or trying to turn up the volume on their speakers to silence their rival’s message, while he distributed pamphlets.

In the middle, members of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), whose candidate -Héctor Rodríguez- is considered to be Maduro’s dolphin, smiled in surprise.

The opposing “yoke of the ego”

His rival finally declined to go to the election and compete for “second place.” He did it just ten days before the elections and, after doing so, asked that in the rest of the country the candidates free themselves from the “yoke of the ego” to achieve unity.

“We are facing the entire machinery of an abusive regime and, to confront them, unity is indispensable,” Ocariz stressed before saying that he was going to “put an end to the unfortunate situation” of the previous days in which his supporters fought with the of Uzcátegui for the same vote in the streets.

The yoke of the ego, which at times seems the most defined trait among Venezuelan opponents, is not unknown among a citizenry as fed up with ruling party members as with their detractors.

The fractures, the myriad anti-Chavista groups that emerge presenting themselves as the last bastion of the defense of democracy, while fighting with the knife between their teeth to defend their position while holding a banner – completely oblivious to the extensive needs of Venezuelans-, they have jaded many citizens who are now asking for the vote.

Those fractures derived from disconnection with society also contribute to subtracting votes, but it is not the only element in the equation.

Venezuelan migration has taken six million people out of the country, according to UN accounts. Most of them are detractors of the Government and many are of legal age, so there are millions of anti-Chavistas who will not vote.

Added to those who no longer believe in voting and those who reject the opposition that, with so much skill, has managed to distance itself from society, the picture is set almost at a draw.

It seems that, in addition to the many obstacles, a large part of the opposition wants the road to be long before reaching their personal Ithaca.