Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was re-elected in a race marked by uncertainty due to the lack of reliable opinion polls. With no indicators to estimate the outcome, analysts heard by Brasil de Fato believe that a determining factor in the result was the so-called “silent vote.”
On the eve of the elections, the center of Caracas was bustling. The streets and stores were full and there was little movement for the vote. When asked, Venezuelans were divided. Out of 15 interviewees, 5 said they would vote for Edmundo González. A smaller group (3) said they would go for Maduro. A larger group (7) had no qualms about saying they wanted “change.”
The week after the elections, the Brasil de Fato reporter carried out the same exercise in the center of Caracas and the number of Venezuelans who said they voted for Maduro grew.
Amid the polarized scenario, the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that the president had received 6.4 million votes (51.97%) against 5.3 million (43.18%) for opposition candidate Edmundo González, with 96.87% of the ballots counted. The opposition disputes the result, claims to have collected 70% of the electoral records from all over the country and says that counting these votes would guarantee the victory of the Unity Platform candidate.
For Sair Sira, a political scientist and analyst with Misión Verdad, the so-called “silent vote” for Maduro stems from the extreme right’s history of violence in recent decades. From the coup against former president Hugo Chávez in 2002, to the violent acts called guarimbas in 2013 and 2017, many supporters of the government stopped displaying symbols and speaking publicly that they were Chavistas out of “fear” of reprisal. For the analyst, this is reflected in many voters who said they wanted change, but didn’t specify the candidate.
“There is a certain consensus on the left that the Chavista is a person who, because of political intolerance, tends not to express his sympathy. First in 2002 there was a witch-hunt, then the guarimbas. So there is this situation on the part of the Chavistas.” He explained that there are many places in Venezuela where you can’t defend Chávez, “because you could be violently rejected.”
Another component is the erosion of Maduro’s image. The sanctions applied by the United States against the country’s oil sector have limited the Venezuelan government’s investment capacity, and it has started to adopt market measures. Opening up capital, fiscal adjustment and freezing salaries were some of the ways out used by Maduro’s economic group to get around high inflation and the uncontrolled exchange rate.
All this caused the president’s popularity to decline. Sectors of the government coalition, the Great Patriotic Pole, initially rejected supporting re-election. Then, with the growing threat from the extreme right, they returned to the debate around chavismo and came to understand that the best way out would be to apply internal pressure to shift the debate to the left.
For lawyer and political economy expert Juan Carlos Valdez, Maduro’s erosion motivated the “silent vote.” He says that this may have had an impact on the opinion polls that pointed to a victory for Edmundo González Urrutia.
“Many Chavistas are tired of Maduro. Many of them may even have said that they wanted Maduro not to run, for the sake of the polls. But what happens is that these Chavistas would never vote for the opposition, especially when María Corina says she’s going to abolish the socialists. It’s a silent vote. And that’s why chavismo remained cohesive at the time of the vote,” he said.
With 10 days to go until the election, the polls indicated uncertainty. Some institutes put the opposition candidate and former ambassador, Edmundo González Urrutia, up to 30 percentage points ahead of President Nicolás Maduro. Others, on the other hand, indicate the incumbent candidate’s victory with the same 30 percentage point gap over his opponent from Plataforma Unitaria.
Racial and class divide
Experts say that one label for persecuting Chavista voters is “buying votes.” The argument is similar to the one used by the Brazilian right with Bolsa Família, that many beneficiaries of the program would vote for the PT not because of the party’s policies, but to “receive money” from the government.
After the sanctions applied by the United States and a boycott by business people, Nicolás Maduro’s government created a program in 2016 to combat product shortages, which affected 80% of Venezuelan supermarkets and 40% of Venezuelan homes. The Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) distribute basic food baskets throughout the country, and seek to organize the Venezuelan population to combat food price speculation.
According to William Serafino, the beneficiaries of this program suffer the same kind of accusations and persecution from opposition groups, from the Venezuelan middle class.
“There is a logic of marginalization, with elements of symbolic aggression that border on racism and classism. This has created a widespread narrative of social condemnation, where people who benefit from social programs are accused of being bought off, accomplices of a dictatorship and of supporting Nicolás Maduro for a bag of food or financial aid. This discourse has sought to legitimize itself on social networks, which has created a situation in which Chavistas avoid identifying themselves in public or answering surveys out of fear,” he said.
Upcoming trials
The image built up by the opposition around the Chavistas has been consolidated in part of the international press. However, for Serafino, the tendency is for this narrative to diminish over time.
“It’s difficult to predict what might happen in the next elections, since one of the aims of the hate campaign has been to exclude Chavismo and place it in a historical and identity non-place. However, on other occasions, hate campaigns have failed to survive for long periods of time, and this could be the case again,” he said.
According to political scientist David Gomez Rodriguez, the international newspapers’ reading of the Chavista voters corroborates this view and makes it difficult to read the next steps in this process.
“The vote is secret, and especially those who are part of party groups express their vote loudly, either in marches or through the media. In the first scenario, Chavismo has demonstrated a much greater capacity for mobilization, while in the second there is a cognitive war where the media have been political actors against the government. So there is a difficulty in gauging this based on the media, especially the international ones. This will be important for the next stages,” Rodriguez said.
This article was translated from an article originally published in Portuguese on Brasil de Fato.
