LatAm in Focus: Venezuela's Electoral Battle on the Ground and Online
LatAm in Focus: Venezuela's Electoral Battle on the Ground and Online
Caracas-based journalist Tony Frangie Mawad and ProBox Executive Director Mariví Marin Vázquez explore what’s at stake in the July 28 election.
Since he came to power 11 years ago, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro has been stacking the deck in his political favor. But will he hit a wall in the July 28 election?
The Maduro regime is trying to pave a path to victory, taking steps like its March disqualification of popular opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado and its arrests of opposition supporters days before the election. Meanwhile the opposition has united behind Machado and her replacement, the seasoned diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia. Polls give him a double-digit advantage over Maduro.
![Tony Frangie Mawad](/sites/default/files/styles/bio_img/public/2024-07/Tony-Frangie-Mawad_0.png?h=36ce04fb&itok=CizeNOk0)
“[The Maduro government] could try to do a mega fraud, but the political costs, even within the ruling coalition, could be very high,” said Tony Frangie Mawad, a journalist and political analyst who is an editor at Caracas Chronicles and has written for Bloomberg, The Economist, Politico, and Americas Quarterly. He explained that while members of the Maduro regime have taken advantage of tight races in the past to claim victory, the broad support for the opposition this time means “they could be forced to recognize a sort of transition.”
In a conversation with Guillermo Zubillaga, head of AS/COA’s Venezuela Working Group, Frangie gives an on-the-ground view of the election and the “tsunami of human mobilization” in Machado’s opposition movement. He also covers how she is reaching younger voters. “She's talking to a generation that hasn't even lived [under a] democracy—which includes me,” says Frangie. “Many young people are actually trying to do something to help, because for young people in Venezuela, a change in the political system means a massive change in their future.”
A unified opposition has a real chance to restore democracy on July 28, write the AS/COA Chairman and President and CEO in Americas Quarterly.
Subscribe to Latin America in Focus, AS/COA's podcast focusing on the latest trends in politics, economics, and culture throughout the Americas.