There was an unusual sense of hope going into Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election. Democracy seemed on the horizon. María Corina Machado, the opposition’s rallying figure, had inspired a rare level of enthusiasm, promising millions of exiles they’d soon be able to return to a new Venezuela.

It seemed voting could bring change. And in a way, it did: the election proved the opposition could win despite an incredibly skewed playing field. But President Nicolás Maduro – in office since 2013 and set to remain until 2031 – stands in the way of what should happen next. He quickly declared himself the winner despite all evidence to the contrary and unleashed repression on the many who took to the streets in protest.

The situation is now at a standstill, and if it drags on, a Maduro-led regime lacking any legitimacy is likely to use ever greater repression to stay in power. Many are deeply disappointed, but longtime Venezuelan activists advise patience alongside ongoing pressure. They knew the election could be the beginning of a much longer process. It’s already given as much as it could; now it’s a matter of finding the right mix of street protest and international incentives to force negotiations that, if successful, would lead to an eventual transition to democracy.

An uneven playing field

Elections are necessary for democracy, but they’re not enough. To qualify as democratic, elections must be competitive, free and fair. Venezuela’s presidential election was none of those.

Before the vote, the government disqualified Machado, one of the country’s most popular politicians, and blocked her replacement, Corina Yoris, from registering. The only reason the opposition reached election day with another candidate was that the authorities didn’t see the consensus choice, largely unknown moderate Edmundo González Urrutia, as a real threat.

The election campaign set new records for unfairness, abuse of power, rights violations and disregard for laws and regulations. Government and pro-government forces persecuted, intimidated and detained opposition party leaders and supporters. The government used the courts to criminalise opposition leaders as a way of suppressing their candidacies or replacing them as party leaders, enabling it to take over parties and make them support Maduro’s bid. Six opposition leaders facing arrest warrants sought asylum in the Argentine embassy and remain there after being denied guarantees to leave the country.

The government brazenly used public funds and assets to finance its campaign, mobilising numerous civil servants to populate government rallies. It used broadcast media as a tool of official propaganda and a source of disinformation and smear campaigns against opposition politicians, while blocking access to a wide range of national and international online media.

The opposition campaign – essentially an old-fashioned nationwide tour, accompanied by a plethora of social media messaging – faced many obstacles. The authorities blocked bridges and roads and made sure petrol stations had no supplies so candidates couldn’t reach their rallies. They confiscated supplies and fined suppliers working with the opposition, including hotels that hosted them and people who provided transport or food.

To make it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote, the government-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) excluded most of the estimated four million Venezuelan voters who’ve fled the country by imposing almost impossible registration requirements. It also repeatedly allocated voters to new polling stations, in some cases in other municipalities and even other states, without giving any notice. And to make it difficult for the opposition to monitor the vote, it created over a thousand new voting centres, often including only one or two polling stations and an average of 300 voters, located in places considered hostile or difficult to access for the opposition.

Election day

Although there were irregularities during the vote, they didn’t seem to be major. Most people in Venezuela, unlike Venezuelans abroad, seemed to be able to vote, and opposition witnesses were mostly allowed to visit polling stations and receive a copy of tallies produced by voting machines at the end of the day, as entitled to by law.

Fraud was hatched elsewhere, in the CNE’s Totalisation Room, where vote tallies from 30,000 polling stations are processed and results calculated. The body responsible for overseeing elections is dominated by government loyalists.

The voting system is technically flawless: it operates on a closed circuit, making it almost impossible to hack, and contains multiple safeguards, including the creation of a paper trail. This means that on election day, voting data flowed into the CNE as expected, and the vote count appeared to go smoothly until about 40 per cent of the votes cast had been counted. That’s when the authorities apparently realised they were losing by an insurmountable margin and stopped transmitting data. Witnesses for the opposition were denied entry to the Totalisation Room and told to watch the results on TV. The CNE website froze and became inaccessible – and has remained so ever since. Without a shred of evidence, the government blamed ‘massive international hacking’, allegedly by opponents based in North Macedonia.

Throughout the afternoon, senior government officials issued media statements seemingly designed to prepare the public for the announcement of a ruling party victory. They circulated exit polls showing Maduro with a lead of over 20 points, supposedly from a polling company that turned out to be fake. Meanwhile, exit polls conducted by opposition and independent pollsters gave González around 70 per cent of the vote.

For hours after the polls closed, there were only silence and rumours. Finally, around midnight, the CNE’s president announced on national television that Maduro had won with 51.20 per cent, or 5,150,092 votes, against González’s 44.20 per cent, or 4,445,978 votes. The vote totals were exact percentages to one decimal place, a near impossibility. It looked as though someone had first decided on a percentage for each of the two main candidates and then multiplied it by the total number of votes to produce a figure for each. Without providing any disaggregated data, the CNE declared Maduro re-elected president.

The Carter Center, the only independent election observer allowed, left Venezuela on 29 July, saying the results presented by the government were unverifiable and the election couldn’t be considered democratic. The opposition, civil society and the international community have since called on the government to produce detailed vote tallies to show where its figures came from, but to no avail.

On 13 August, a United Nations (UN) panel of experts on Venezuela issued a preliminary report concluding that the CNE had failed to comply with ‘basic measures of transparency and integrity that are essential for the conduct of credible elections’, as well as ‘national legal and regulatory provisions and all established deadlines’.

What’s changed

But the story doesn’t end with massive fraud: some profound changes have taken place that suggest this is only the beginning.

For the first time in memory, no significant section of the opposition boycotted the election. Instead, the opposition held a primary vote that chose Machado as a unity candidate. More than two million people took part in this, despite threats from the authorities, censorship and physical attacks on candidates at campaign rallies. But the results were immediately annulled by the government-aligned Supreme Court, which upheld an old disqualification against Machado, the result of a conviction on unsubstantiated corruption charges. The government then made the opposition jump through hoops to name a replacement.

Machado pulled off the seemingly impossible job of transferring her popularity to her successor, a softly spoken former diplomat who wasn’t on the political radar. While not being on the ballot paper, Machado remains the undisputed opposition leader.

In addition to being united, the opposition developed a strategy, Plan 600K, to do everything it could to scrutinise the election. It recruited some 600,000 volunteers to ensure the defence of the vote through comanditos, groups of around 10 people each. By early July, the opposition claimed that more than 58,300 comanditos had been formed. On election day, they were present at polling stations across Venezuela to ensure everyone could exercise their right to vote and to safeguard the vote count.

They stayed throughout the day, and when the polls closed, took a copy of the tally sheet, photographed it, scanned the QR code and transferred the data, along with the paper documentation, to collection centres. Knowing what was coming, the opposition had worked with programmers to replicate an electoral computing centre so they could process the data and independently produce the real figures down to polling station level.

This novel strategy caught the government off guard. By the time the CNE made its first announcements, the opposition had already counted 30 per cent of the ballots and knew it had won by a wide margin. The following day, opposition leaders held a press conference claiming to have counted over 70 per cent of the votes, giving González around 67 per cent and Maduro 29 per cent – an unassailable lead that made González president-elect. They opened up their database to the public, allowing investigative journalists and election experts to verify its accuracy.

The revelation of the crude nature of the government’s fraud brought a second major shift: the withdrawal of support from some states that customarily support Maduro. On election night, only four friendly authoritarian governments – China, Cuba, Iran and Russia – congratulated Maduro on his supposed re-election.

At the other end of the spectrum, several governments in the Americas, including Canada and the USA, refused to recognise the official results. Some, such as Argentina’s far-right libertarian president Javier Milei, did so for ideological reasons. But the rejections that carried the most weight came from Latin America’s democratic left, best represented by Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who based his position on the unconditional defence of democracy.

The day after the election, the Venezuelan government expelled the diplomatic delegations of the seven Latin American countries that had questioned the election. The Argentine embassy, still home to six political asylum seekers, was left for Brazil to look after.

Somewhere in between, the European Union and three left-wing American governments – Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – said they’d recognise the results once the government produced the vote tallies that supported them and these were independently verified. Ahead of the election, Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the government to ensure transparent elections and respect the results. They’re now in the best position to negotiate a transition behind the scenes. They’re the countries that receive most of Venezuela’s migrants, more of whom might leave the country if the crisis isn’t resolved.

What hasn’t changed

Before the election, Maduro warned of a ‘bloodbath’ if he didn’t win. He’s responded as expected, just as he did in the face of mass protests in 2014 and 2017 – with brutal repression that left at least 25 dead.

From the early hours of 29 July, hundreds took to the streets of Caracas and other cities to protest against the implausible official results, and by the morning there were thousands across the country, mostly in the densely populated working-class neighbourhoods that were once government strongholds.

Maduro called the protests a ‘fascist outbreak’ and announced the construction of new prisons for detainees. Repression was often left in the hands of so-called ‘armed collectives’ of pro-government paramilitaries who blocked marches, beat protesters and kidnapped opposition election observers. Lists of people wanted for allegedly inciting violence, including journalists and members of the opposition, were circulated on social media, and the authorities called for people to report those taking part in the protests. In some Caracas neighbourhoods, pro-government groups tried to intimidate people by marking the houses of people perceived to be opposition supporters.

Security forces used pellets and teargas against protesters and arbitrarily arrested hundreds, charging them with terrorism or incitement to hatred. Over 2,400 people were arrested, according to official figures. The UN Human Rights Office found that most detainees weren’t allowed to choose their own lawyer or contact their families, and classed some of these cases as enforced disappearances. As of 13 August, the civil society group Foro Penal had verified 1,393 arrests, including 117 of children aged between 14 and 17.

But even when repression forced people back into their homes in fear for their lives, sporadic pot-banging protests continued to erupt.

What must change

Whether the 28 July election marks the beginning of a democratic transition will depend on a combination of three factors, none of which is sufficient on its own: mass protest, international pressure and division and defection among the military.

Many Venezuelans saw the election as their last chance before giving up and joining the millions who’ve left. The exodus, the turnout, the results and the ensuing protests are all signs that the vast majority no longer support the government, and many actively oppose it.

So far, opposition leaders have refrained from calling people out onto the streets because, given the regime’s repressive response, more protests will inevitably mean further casualties. But without mass mobilisation, the regime could quickly regain control and opposition leaders could end up in prison. It remains to be seen how many will dare to take to the streets, for how long and how far the government will go to suppress them.

Maduro will only leave when he calculates that the cost of staying is higher than the cost of leaving, so any international negotiation should aim to lower his exit costs. This means the price of transition would likely be an unpalatable concession of immunity – and therefore impunity – for Maduro and other top officials.

But there’s only so much international pressure can do. Maduro has already shown he’s willing to take the hit of international isolation if that’s what it takes to stay in power. He has systematically reneged on all his international commitments, including the Barbados Agreement that paved the way for the election. What’s more, the states most willing to broker a deal have little leverage because Venezuela doesn’t depend on them, while the countries it does rely on, China and Russia, have no incentive to promote democracy.

Two of the three elements in the equation have begun to shift: a clear majority has expressed its will at the ballot box and on the streets, and ideologically close former international allies have insisted that the will of the people must be respected. The third remains an unknown. Even under siege and internationally isolated, the regime could survive if it remains determined to tackle the crisis with violence, as it has done so far, and if security forces remain on its side. The fate of millions depends on what happens next.

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