Left winger holds on in Venezuela election

Maduro supporters campaigning in Venezuela’s election

President Nicolas Maduro won Venezuela’s presidential election on Sunday, according to results announced by the electoral council. With most of the votes counted, Maduro and his left wing PSUV party was on 51 percent of the vote.

That’s compared with 44 percent for his main rival, the right wing Unitary Platform’s candidate Edmundo Gonzalez. Maduro ran on a programme of helping the poor and an oppositional stance to the United States.

The Unitary Platform is a coalition of opposition parties. Its defining goal is an end to Maduro’s rule and bending the knee to Western imperialism.

After the result was announced, the right wing attacked the election result as fraudulent. Unitary Platform instead claimed, “Venezuela has a new president-elect and it is Edmundo Gonzalez.” But Gonzalez said he was not calling for supporters to take to the streets to commit any acts of violence.

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado demanded a military coup. She told the military, “It is time to put yourselves on the right side of history. You have a chance and it’s now.”

And imperialist forces lined up behind them, with US secretary of state Antony Blinken saying he had “serious concerns” about the result. Maduro has been in office from 2013, since the death of the left wing nationalist Hugo Chavez who had enacted programmes of social reforms that benefited the poor.

But while Chavez used a language of liberation and solidarity, he left behind the structures of capitalism intact. Power was increasingly concentrated within a state bureaucracy, as there hadn’t been a transfer of power into mass organisations.

Yet at key moments it was the mass mobilisation of workers and the poor that save Chavez from the rage of the rich. Maduro inherited the power of the Chavista state but without Chavez’s influence or popularity—he doesn’t offer a way forward.

But this doesn’t mean that the right wing forces, backed by US imperialism and representing the oil bosses and the rich, should be given any leeway. The right wing vultures that are circling want to turn the clock back to before Chavez was president, when their power and wealth went unchallenged.

And Venezuela’s economy has dropped over the last decade due to plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 1.7 million percent in 2018. Ordinary people are struggling, with basic foods and medicines staggeringly expensive or unavailable and wages stagnating or declining.

This has been worsened by international economic sanctions targeting Venezuela because it doesn’t follow the line of the US. The outbreak of a coup would mean violence for working people.

Transformation in favour of those at the bottom of society requires a systemic assault on the structures of imperialism and capitalism.