The crisis in Venezuela, as well as the path to restoring its democratic constitutional order, is unprecedented.
Recently, the US imposed sanctions on Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in addition to those already adopted before. These sanctions affect financing operations, as well as the gold sector, and augur an extremely difficult scenario for Nicolás Maduro’s regime. At the same time, they come at a high cost to the general population. The immediate expectation is that this situation produces a breaking point that leads to change. However, it is not enough on its own.
We need an electoral horizon.
Without reliable elections, the already-immense suffering of the Venezuelan people would be even greater; and we would inevitably witness a political conflict escalation with an unpredictable outcome. Recently, Professor Fernando Mires wrote that the moment is political, not insurrectional. He is right. Betting on the conflict between the interim presidency of Juan Guaidó and the illegitimate presidency of Nicolás Maduro, without deploying the art of politics, could lead to a military solution. Perilously, this option does not necessarily ensure recovering the constitutional thread we aspire for Venezuela.
Moving forward with the interim presidency of Juan Guaidó as the President of the National Assembly, built on the basis of both the Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution and the immense international support, without a credible electoral perspective could be perceived as a bet in favor of an undesired foreign military intervention. Such an intervention could lead to a tragic unknown. Moreover, it could open up a chapter in which many voices that have joined in condemning the illegitimacy of Maduro’s regime withdraw their support. Here, the sensible thing is to take advantage of this extraordinary positioning—without a doubt the best one the democratic forces in Venezuela have seen to date, with an unprecedented international backing—and induce a negotiation that leads to credible elections, within the framework of a sustainable political-economic transition. In fact, the Article 233 of the Constitution is blunt: any Acting President in this scenario assumes that role to facilitate a presidential election within 30 days.
On the other hand, if Maduro’s regime had accepted the European Union’s proposal of facilitating presidential elections in eight days, the path to instrumenting it would have been through Maduro’s resignation. In that case, the Vice President would have assumed the interim position for thirty days, while elections were held.
Regardless the path, something is clear: there is no way to hold credible elections in Venezuela within 30 days. And the project towards change would not succeed without the legal guarantees needed for this electoral process to be carried out such that political actors can compete in conditions that allow a legitimate result. In both scenarios, everything brings us back to the urgency of having free and fair elections. It is an indispensable condition for the legitimacy and viability of the complex process that Venezuela is going through and will allow the Venezuelan people to have the last word. Therefore, the question is how to build this electoral horizon, reachable within a reasonable period of time, making the necessary exception on the 30-day restriction, given that it is materially impossible to hold them within that number of days.
At the same time, there is something the international community—mainly the US and Europe, specifically the Trump administration—could do to help pave the way towards this peaceful and negotiated scenario. For one, it could have a frank conversation with China and other countries that may influence Maduro’s change in behavior. China must be persuaded into agreeing that no one in the international community should impose an agenda in Venezuela different than facilitating free and fair elections, which is possible given the length of interests at stake between the US and China. Furthermore, the US should insist that it corresponds to Venezuelans to choose a destiny for themselves through free and fair elections, in accordance with an agreed sustainable transition, and, of course, with the necessary international accompaniment to assure to all that the word pledged must be fulfilled.
Disavowing legitimacy for Maduro’s presidency and supporting the interim term of the president of the National Assembly, by the Trump administration is one of the few, if not the only, issue that has bipartisan support. As soon as the US government made an announcement, Democrats did so in the same direction. Among them, the US Senate Minority Whip, Dick Durbin (who, furthermore, met with Maduro last year to warn him that any elections without guarantees, which Maduro proposed to do in May 2018, would not be recognized internationally); the Democrat leader in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Bob Menéndez; the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, parliamentary leader of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi; and Eliot Engel the New York Democrat, who chairs the US House Committe on Foreign Affairs.
In addition to the bipartisan effort to recover the Venezuelan democracy, this week, the Democratic US Congress representatives for southeast Florida, Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, presented two bills, in addition to the strict financial sanctions against PDVSA: one prohibiting the sale of military supplies to Venezuela’s Armed Forces; and the other providing a framework for deepening humanitarian aid during this transition. Furthermore, Senator Menéndez (from New Jersey) and Congressman Darren Soto (from Orlando, FL) presented legislation in both Houses to grant migration relief or temporary protection status (TPS) to Venezuelans in the United States.
There is no doubt that the path with least obstacles is the electoral one. For this, a there is a protocol that must be fulfilled, which, admittedly, is not easy.
The first major step would be for the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela— Maduro’s party) representatives to return to the National Assembly, which is the only legitimate institution in the constitutional discarding that is Venezuela, as well as the only place where all the of the country’s political forces coincide by the will of the people. From there—with the support of the same international community that is pressing for a resolution of this crisis— consensus must be reached to enact an special electoral statute that should regulate those elections to be held in a reasonable time. This, in conjunction with the Amnesty Law, is indispensable to restore the constitutional order in a peaceful manner. Once that path is cleared, there would be an urgent need to address the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, while taking the minimum and indispensable steps to stop the economic debacle that the Maduro regime has dragged on us.
Para español lea Al Navío: ¿Cómo encauzar la crisis de Venezuela hacia una solución electoral?