Venezuela: elections on December 6, the people expressed their protest against authoritarianism and misery

By Marea Socialista

Let’s promote unity of action for the struggle

The results of the elections weren’t a surprise with an abstention rate of almost 69%, which means that out of every 10 Venezuelan voters, 7 decided to abstain.

Thus, of the 31% who went out to exercise their right to vote, 67.6% did so in favor of the government, while 29% were spread out among the votes of the Right-wing opposition. Of this percentage, two of the opposition options reached 22.1%: Alianza Democrática and PV. The “other” minority parties of the Right opposition obtained a percentage of 6.9%. That is to say that the option that brings together the Right’s votes as a whole would add up to 29%

The leftist option expressed on the PCV card reached the percentage of 2.6%.

Now, if we look at the whole electoral population and not just the actual voters, the 67.6% the PSUV-GPP obtained from the 31% who voted, becomes approximately 17% of the total electoral population, which would be the real political weight of the PSUV and its allies in terms of votes. This allows us to observe that this minority managed, in the current electoral conditions and with the current system, to gain control of two thirds of the National Assembly. Then; 17 % will handle 67.6 % of the Legislative Power.

In the same way, the right wing opposition would represent only 5% of the electorate, although in the elections it obtained a total of about 29% of the votes for the NA.

Abstention

Beyond the race in the G4 to capitalize on abstention as an eventual victory by other means. However, it really was predictable and the majority of the population was sure that abstention would be the queen of the party. To proclaim oneself the owner of abstention is something even more ridiculous. It is undeniable that in spite of the wear and tear of Guaidó and the others, there is an increasingly smaller sector of the population that follows them and they could have complied with the orientation to abstain, but in no way does it represent abstentionism as a whole.

But it is not only the leadership of the right-wing opposition, interventionism and interference that wears out, that declines. Abstention also accounts for the wear and tear on the PSUV’s machinery, which in a structured way managed to make many voters feel forced, in some way, to go and vote, even if they did not want to, for fear of losing their jobs (despite the miserable salaries), or some other few benefits that are still preserved, as well as not to stop receiving small social supplements (bonuses, CLAP funds) to resist the crisis. Not to mention the tricks and the pro-government advantage.

The discontent of the base of Chavism was not expressed in the option of the Popular Revolutionary Alternative (APR) with the card of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). What prevailed in the discontented base of Chavism was demobilization. The structures of control and blackmail at the base are no longer sufficient to move people to vote as they once did.

Abstention has a side that expresses despair, breakage and weariness, but above all the absence of an alternative to the political rot that is presented as government and the traditional Right opposition. It is as if there were a repressed cry of Out with all of you! that found its expression in the demobilizing abstention, but not as a weapon of expression of the policy of the right wing of the G4 that today, wanting to abolish the high rate of abstention, promises us more promotion of sanctions, more misery, and all in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”.

The vote for the APR-PCV

Together with a part of the abstention, the vote for the PCV-APR, in a certain way reflects the only sector of effective voters who opposed the government from the left, and in that sense a certain progressive character can be attributed to it, but many people who are dissatisfied with the government, who do not deny what was once the “revolutionary process,” tended to see them as almost “more of the same,” because of their very late differentiation and lack of previous resistance to the government of Nicolás Maduro-Militares-PSUV.

This is after so many years of administration in which all the conquests of the process, both social, economic and political, as well as in matters of sovereignty, were destroyed under the impassive gaze of the pro-government allies, in spite of their friction with the United States. And perhaps for that reason, among others, the card of the PCV-APR did not work out, although at the last minute it campaigned with the slogans for salary or against the badly named Anti-Blockade Law. He had to bear the consequences of his late and incomplete demarcation, mainly electoral in nature rather than in the real field of the struggles of the working class and the people.

The low amount of votes for this option is an expression of the absence of left-wing alternatives that would show a real break with the government, which did not happen with the VCP as the leading voice of a bloc in which other minority factors participated, and that, beyond the complaints and the repugnant attacks that they received as retaliation for presenting candidates other than the GPP, they are carrying the fact of having been part of the ANC and of having supported policies that, from the government, have left an important sector of the population suffering the consequences of misery, hunger and repression.

The votes of the Right opposition option

The majority of this right-wing voter population expressed themselves through the sector that disassociated itself from Juan Guaidó, made up of those who occupied the leadership of the parties via the Supreme Court. It functions with the government not only in relation to the economic program through the Anti-Blockade Law, but also in an anti-democratic manner. This alliance was led by the evangelicals with Bertucci as their spokesperson, something that has an element of captive vote through the parishioners of the evangelical church. This sector now projects itself as the “second” political force in the country followed by the coalition Venezuela Unida where the homonymous parties of Primero Justicia and a fraction of Voluntad and other parties expressed themselves in what was presented as the opposition of the center with a policy of “dialogue and understanding” as a center option in which Henry Falcón, Claudio Fermín, Juan Barreto and the MAS signed in.

That 5% of the universe of voters in Venezuela or 29% of those who went out to vote, give an account of an opposition that did not manage to place itself as an alternative. It did not motivate the vote. It did not manage to build a political space within the right wing opposition base, partly and among other things, precisely because it had a policy that made the population feel that they were playing in the same team as the government.

The votes for the PSUV and the GPP

The government frantically celebrates the victory built on a deeply undemocratic architecture. The government obtained 3,558,320 votes, 67.6% of the valid votes, which really represents 17% of the Permanent Electoral Registry. Such is the result it obtained after systematically prohibiting the legalization of parties, outlawing others, assaulting directives via TSJ to assign cards to an opposition that showed more coincidence than differences with the government. It also based his victory on the use of the entire State apparatus at the service of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, using resources of all kinds and control and blackmail through the governing bureaucracy and the base structures that distribute food and control the delivery of bonds in a Venezuela without salaries and with one of the highest poverty rates in the continent.

The “victory” has to do with the possibility of the continuity of a policy of surrender of sovereignty, of a mega privatization plan and of the legal and juridical armor so that the privatizations are a fait accompli in the shortest time possible. It also represents the continuity of the adjustment that the government has carried out against the working class. The “new” National Assembly means that the government controls the only legislative power.

We have said that this new National Assembly is born “shaved off”, since the Executive has taken away many of its main powers, especially in economic matters through the so-called Anti-Blockade Act, which will serve a large part of the legislative agenda in order to carry out privatizations and surrender to foreign capital and powers (China, Russia, without ruling out the Europeans and the US), as well as taking advantage of the extreme labor flexibilization and precariousness already imposed on the people to guarantee businessmen almost zero labor costs.

The NA promises to be the answer to the ANC’s without debate or discussion. It is the place where the hardest blow to the Venezuelan population is being dealt, but above all where the businesses that will come out of the Anti-Blockadeade Law will be armored, and that is the way the bureaucracy will consolidate itself as the new caste of the bourgeoisie.

The Null Vote

The policy of the Null Vote was promoted by Marea Socialista as a way of seeing ourselves in a common action in an electoral scenario in which not only we have not been systematically denied participation through refusal, via TSJ, of the legalization of our political organization, but we had no alternatives with which we could identify.

But the Null Vote is the great absentee of the 2020 parliamentary elections. The new electoral system eliminated the actions that could be executed as a null vote. In spite of that, those of us who were able to demonstrate looking for mechanisms or simply letting time go by to have the vote annulled, cannot know what the percentage is since the NEC does not issue the results of the Null Vote. Only by taking out the accounts presented by the First Bulletin of the CNE does it account for the 0.5% that could have executed this action.

The conclusion is that the government cannot present the invalid vote or its results because they would simply express discontent, a protest with all one’s voice before an authoritarian, anti-worker government that has meant a retreat from the conquests we obtained in the framework of the revolutionary process. It is the continued blow to the process when time and again they were giving space to the policies being implemented in favor of the traditional bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy that was rising as a new component of it

Building a Workers’ Party

It is urgent and necessary to build and rebuild the political strength of the workers, the popular sectors, women and youth from an anti-capitalist, ecological, feminist and socialist perspective.

Building this force means acting in an organized manner against the advance of the government in the coup that it is inflicting on the working class through the elimination of wages and all labor benefits, against the policy that is taking away the lands from organized peasants to give them to the military and landowners, against the Anti-Blockadeade Law that is nothing more than dispossession and surrender of sovereignty, against repression and violation of basic human rights, against authoritarianism and the curtailment of democratic freedoms. But it also means confronting with the same force the pro-injectionist and interventionist policy of the traditional right, as well as confronting with force the theft of our resources through the policy of imposing a presidential figure that was not elected by the people as Guaidó is, or those who promote military intervention like María Corina or Ledezma. We also fiercely oppose the sanctions that add to the ordeal we suffer every day and for the reconstruction of the organisms of the working class with independence from the corrupt bureaucracy and the bosses’ parties, against the payment of the corrupt debt that sacrifices the population, against the depredation of the Orinoco Mining Arch.

To this construction, to this challenge we invite you. We want you to become part of this force that emerges beyond the domes of the corrupt and the surrenderers, the embezzlers of the nation who are in government and in the opposition.

This is not the time to give in to defeat. It is time for workers to organize and fight. That we build our own force independent of the leadership of the government and all its functional right-wing opposition and that above all we become a real option for power.