Writer, activist and director of the Centre for Studies for Socialist Democracy Reinaldo Iturriza, discusses the competing — and inadequate — narratives surrounding Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election with Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s Federico Fuentes.
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The July 28 presidential election seems to be a repeat of previous elections, with the opposition again claiming fraud and the government again denouncing an attempted coup. What is your assessment?
If we are genuinely interested in understanding what is happening in Venezuela, we need to start with what actually occurred.
The first fact to bear in mind is that Venezuelans who voted on July 28 did so in a context of a profound crisis of political representation. Generally speaking, the political class is in the worst state it has been for the past 25 years.
We have an anti-Chavista political class burdened by the accumulated weight of successive defeats; reviled by its social support base; prey to its own contradictions; lacking an undisputed and unifying leadership; with little strategic clarity; that is under the tutelage of the United States government; and which is paying the price for its anti-democratic dalliances that squandered its accumulated political capital.
On the other hand, we have a governing class that is also prey to its own contradictions. This generated an internal dispute in which the most conservative and pragmatic tendencies won out. This in turn led to the working class ceasing to constitute the backbone of the governing bloc of forces.
Since the governing class’s defeat in the 2015 parliamentary elections, but especially from September 2018 onwards (when it began implementing an orthodox-monetarist economic program), this governing class has tried to recompose its bloc from above, together with fractions of the capitalist class.
This process created the conditions for a gradual disintegration of its political strength from below. For the past decade, huge contingents of what was once the government’s working-class support base have disaffiliated from Chavismo.
What are the implications of all this for the July 28 presidential elections? First, it was quite clear that both forces went into the campaign with their respective social bases in a profoundly weakened state.
Second, that the strategic shift adopted by the governing class means we have to question a fact once taken for granted: that elections are a contest between two antagonistic historical projects. Programmatic debate was practically absent throughout the campaign.
Third, an important section of the population exercised their right to vote despite not feeling represented by any candidate.
Lastly, a considerable part of the opposition’s vote did not reflect an identification with anti-Chavismo, but was fundamentally a vote against the government. The opposite is also true: part of the official candidate’s vote did not reflect support for the government, but rather rejection of a potential ultra-right victory.
Typical interpretations are completely inadequate for assessing what has happened in Venezuela since July 28. They are based, at best, on superficial readings and, at worst, on a complete ignorance of what has occurred in recent years, in terms of the balance of political forces.
What we have is a situation in which reasonable doubt, and with it a genuine sense of unease, has taken hold in the heart of Venezuelan society.
The popular protests that took place on July 29 were a direct result of this. There is no doubt that both forces sought to eventually intervene in the events of that day: one side by seeking to capitalise on discontent and stoking violence, the other by imposing order.
We can say that today, order reigns in Venezuela, though lingering doubts and a sense of unrest remain.
Why do you think the National Electoral Council (CNE) and the government have so far failed to release a breakdown of the vote and tally sheets?
It is worth recalling the exact words of the electoral council head Elvis Amoroso, when announcing the first official bulletin in the early hours of July 29.
He : “The booth-by-booth results will be available on the website of the National Electoral Council in the next few hours, as has traditionally occurred, thanks to the automated voting system. Likewise, the results will be handed over to political organisations on a CD, in accordance with the law.â€
Not only did this not happen, but the explanations why have been frankly insufficient.
Publishing results in a disaggregated and verifiable manner is not just a technical matter, it is a genuinely substantive issue: we are talking about something that is both an obligation of the electoral arbiter and a right of the Venezuelan people, who feel this right has been stolen from them.
How did we get into this situation?
I have provided some background to help us understand how we got to the current situation.
But I would like to add the following: I completely understand why the impacts of the imperialist economic siege on Venezuela are so often invoked to account for popular unrest.
What is more, I would say the reason is obvious: in effect, this siege has exponentially multiplied any damage inflicted on the population by the economic crisis that existed prior to the first sanctions being imposed on Petróleos de Venezuela [the state-owned oil and gas company] in August 2017.
We are talking about punitive and illegal measures that have sought to accelerate the collapse of the national economy and, to put it bluntly, produce human suffering and deaths.
Faced with such an extreme situation, a society such as Venezuela’s — which has lived through years of intense politicisation — will naturally proceed to weigh up the damage caused by such attacks against the decisions taken by the political leadership to circumvent them.
The way the governing class dealt with these circumstances was to construct a narrative according to which there was no alternative to the measures it eventually adopted. This was the first bad sign.
No space was allowed for public, participatory and protagonist deliberations over varying options, for the simple reason that there was only one option. But what if the only alternative called into question the strategic goals of the Bolivarian revolution itself? Bad luck.
Once this logic was installed within the governing class, the only alternative was the set of measures applied from September 2018 onwards: drastic cuts in public spending, wage devaluation to a historic low, etc.
This helps at least partially explain the very grave fact that a significant part of the citizenry went to the extreme of considering Venezuela’s ultra-right as a viable political option.
[Read the full interview at .]