I have the impression that the difference expressed by the pre-candidate María Corina Machado (MCM) and her followers, regarding the result that the opposition primary process should produce, has not been sufficiently analyzed. It is one thing to go to this process with the intention of demonstrating with votes the preference of the Venezuelan opposition people regarding their opposition leadership and quite another that an opposition candidate emerges from this process to put the regime in front for a presidential election. They are two very different things and this is what I tried to differentiate in my last note (see Primaries: Leadership versus candidate? in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/primaries-leadership-versus-candidate.html).
No one can deny the success of MCM's strategy of using this process to agglutinate the necessary popular force to politically bring to its knees the current opposition leadership represented by the status quo political parties, current holders of the opposition political representation in Venezuela and abroad.
If the primaries take place, with the current poll numbers, MCM should rise with the leadership of the political opposition and undisputed representative of the opposition population, backed with the votes of the majority. And for this to happen, he should only wait for the primaries to take place and for what the polls indicate and the political perception of those who have so far supported the phenomenon of his pre-candidacy to materialize in a definitive manner.
But as we have always pointed out, the devil also plays, and without the need of using a crystal ball or having the fortune-telling skills of any seer, everything indicates that the primary process will be sabotaged by the regime, to avoid precisely that: that MCM becomes an unstoppable electoral phenomenon, capable of calling into question any electoral result favorable to the tyranny, forged in the kettles of the next CNE chosen by Cilia Flores.
Thus, the traditional enemies of MCM's aspirations will be working hard in overt or covert alliances with the regime, so that these primaries do not take place. This does not mean that after that step there will not be an "opposition candidate", product of any arrangement. But, will that candidate coincide with the option to which all polls, endorsements and preferences point to? That is the big question. If after a sabotage of such magnitude, all the opposition agrees that, regardless of the primaries, MCM is the one that should lead the opposition against Maduro's tyranny, there would be a possibility to get out of the regime, even if they try to cheat.
But if the opposition is diluted after sabotaging the primaries, that is as far as the hopes of the opposition people for elections will go. From the categorical declarations of MCM in the sense of not accepting any "consensus", such possibility would be closed: "Nobody here is going to accept any consensus around anybody, around anybody. And don't even think of suggesting it to me, because here the one who has to decide is the people of Venezuela" (see in Spanish @elpoliticove, 07-04-2023, Statements by MCM, in https://twitter.com/elpoliticove/status/1676399359246606337).
And what would happen then if the regime does not allow the Venezuelan opposition people to express themselves in a primary? A deadlocked game. And the regime would be waiting for precisely that in order to avoid a candidate with the necessary political strength to shake the setup they are preparing.
If there are no primaries, and consequently, there is no effective counting of the opposition votes, the possibility of officially marking the opposition leadership sought by MCM remains an aspiration. The regime has been a specialist in all these years in preventing this from happening. Remember the failed Revocatory Referendum attempt of 2016. When they know they are going to lose, they always manage to avoid a decisive count that makes it very difficult for people to believe an open fraud, especially in this case with all the eyes of the world on Venezuela.
As I have already commented, there are two dimensions to this political situation, which revolve around what these opposition primaries are for: The first dimension defines the primaries as the way to elect a candidate against the regime. In this dimension, without primaries there are three options for those who aspire: a) that the pre-candidates agree to designate MCM as the opposition candidate, based on polls and people's perception. This option looks uphill, especially for those pre-candidates who still believe they can beat MCM in a primary, although it would generate a platform of opposition struggle supported inside and outside the country, to put up a good fight against the regime and finally achieve its participation despite the disqualification; b) that MCM accepts to negotiate with the rest of the candidates a different option on which to turn the political capital of all to face the regime in 2024. This option would be different from a "consensus among all", since a different character would be sought from the 14 existing pre-candidates, but it would require a joint negotiation which MCM rejects; and c) that each pre-candidate not disqualified goes alone before the regime to register his candidacy before the NEC. The latter is suicidal for all, and is the one expected by the regime.
Now, in the other dimension, if the primaries are for the election of a new political leader of the opposition, as has been the intention of MCM from the beginning, the probable disappearance of the primary mechanism leaves at a standstill the possibility of materializing in pure and hard votes that new leadership, unless other alternatives are sought to carry out that election, as in a past opportunity was proposed by MCM itself. This would require the participation of all the truly opposing political forces, and that they willingly accept the result. It would be something like a "primary" among real opponents to the regime (in quotation marks because it would no longer be to look for a presidential candidate) which I would not hesitate to qualify as clandestine, as a form of civil resistance, which would result in the installation and activation of a permanent command of struggle with a clear leadership for the rescue of democracy and freedom.
In my opinion, this is probably a more realistic dimension than the previous one, and I am sure that it would unite a great part of the opposition population of the country. It would remain for those of us who believe in the need for a new leadership to make it a reality, and that would bring the same results of a failed primary, only without the need to hide it behind the participation in an election in front of those who count the votes in a tyranny.
Caracas, July 14, 2023
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario