Will Venezuela’s Maduro go out with a bang or a whimper?

The hour of truth is approaching for Venezuela. On July 28, over 20mn eligible voters will cast their ballots to pick their future president from among a list of ten candidates. In fact the real competition is between two men: Nicolas Maduro, the incumbent seeking a third six-year term, and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, a 74-year-old seasoned diplomat who has managed to unite the historically fractious opposition coalition, Unitary Platform.

Many view Gonzalez, a soft-spoken figure previously unknown to the public, as a stand-in candidate for firebrand opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a popular lawyer leading the centre-right Vente Venezuela Party who was barred from running on spurious corruption charges earlier this year.

The country, home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, has been governed by Chavismo – a peculiar mix of populism and socialism with an indigenous twist – since 1999, when leftist Hugo Chavez won an election by promising better living conditions to a burgeoning poor segment of the population.

Venezuela, thanks to its natural endowment, was Latin America’s safest and most prosperous nation for the most of the 20^th century; in 1970, the country was churning out 3.8mn barrels per day (bpd) of oil. However, the tide turned in the 1990s, when years of mismanagement and corruption started to bite into the living standards of a previously thriving middle class.

Following a failed coup attempt in 1992, Chavez won the election on democratic terms. And initially he delivered on many of his promises.

After nationalising oil and mining companies, he successfully managed to expand welfare, housing and social programmes for the poor by funnelling billions from national energy company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), capitalising on a seemingly endless oil boom. However, he completely ignored investment in any other sector, and failed to maintain extractive infrastructure properly. This, in hindsight, will prove to be his greatest blunder, sealing the country’s bitter fate.

Make no mistake, though. Chavez was by no means a democratic leader; in his quest for total control, he soon began to curtail media freedom, crack down on the opposition and monopolise the judiciary and state institutions.

Still, many in Venezuela and abroad view him with a sense of nostalgia: a benevolent paternal figure, a maverick who made important mistakes but “had [his] heart in the right place.”

Chavez was gifted with a magnetic charisma, which allowed him to coalesce a slew of fellow Latin American leftist leaders – such as Brazil’s Lula and Argentina’s Fernández de Kirchner – behind the common banner of a “pink tide” revolution, ready to take on Washington’s political and financial imperialism in the region.

“The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house,” he said in an impassioned speech at the UN in 2006, while lashing out at then-US President George W. Bush by quoting Aristotle and Noam Chomsky in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq.

Such enlightened tantrums quickly made the Venezuelan leader an icon within Western leftist circles and bolstered his image as the ultimate defender of the Global South – what now many prefer to call a “multipolar world.”

His rhetoric somewhat mellowed after the election of President Obama in 2008, to whom he famously said: “I want to be your friend.” Still, a deep-seated bitterness towards the West prevailed and political shifts in neighbouring nations made Cuba, China, Iran and Russia his natural partners on the global stage.

Chavez’s fortunes started to wane around 2010 when Venezuela began to suffer from hyperinflation, triggered by the global financial crisis, and a slump in crude prices.

Just as things could not get any worse, he was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. He died a year later aged 58, only a few months after winning an election.

Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver with no prior education, readily took the reins of power, allegedly having been personally picked by Chavez from among the ranks of the ruling PSUV party.

Maduro was never nearly as popular as his predecessor, completely lacking his charisma and being widely perceived as provincial, crooked and more authoritarian. In 2013, he won at the ballot box by a margin of less of 1%; analysts consider this election to be the last freely contested in modern Venezuelan history.

Since then, a perfect storm of spiralling hyperinflation, a spike in gang-related crime and widespread corruption have gripped the country, prompting over 7.7mn Venezuelans – about a third of the population – to emigrate amid lack of prospects, rising insecurity and failing healthcare. It quickly became clear how Maduro’s incompetence largely outpaced his corrupt nature, as he failed to revive the country’s ailing oil industry, destroyed relations with the West and resorted to borrowing huge sums of money from China.

In 2019, at the peak of the crisis, Venezuela owed around $100bn to its external creditors – mainly Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow.

Still, the iron-fisted, self-proclaimed Marxist has been remarkably good at one thing. He has weathered global and regional tensions, clinging on to power by surrounding himself with a circle of loyal – and mostly incompetent – acolytes.

After the 2018 elections, boycotted by the opposition due to an increasingly uneven playing field and growing repression, the situation reached new levels of absurdity, as the US and the West rebuffed the results and recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate ruler.

Despite plunging the country further into despair and isolation, this turned into a short-lived popularity boon for Maduro, boosting his credentials at home as Guaido was just as incompetent and corrupt, but enjoyed the support of the “evil imperialist” West.

Under the Trump administration Washington slapped heavy sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports and handed the opposition the control of Venezuela’s most prized foreign asset: Citgo, a US-based refiner owned by state-run PDVSA.

Valued at a mere $13bn, the company's fate now hangs in the balance as US courts move forward with auctioning its shares to satisfy creditors' claims – stemming from Chavez-era expropriations and past defaults – totalling $21.3bn.

Meanwhile, the Bolivarian government loosened currency controls in 2019, de facto encouraging the use of the dollar as a substitute to a basically worthless bolivar. And, with little publicity, it actively engaged in dialogue with the new US administration.

This led Washington, now desperate to keep rising oil prices at bay and curb illegal migration ahead of the 2024 election, to okay a joint venture between US oil major Chevron and PDVSA in late 2022, as Venezuela’s oil output reached an all-time low of 730,000 bpd.

A year later the Biden administration went even further, waiving all sanctions for a six-month period to reward Maduro for signing in Barbados an agreement with the opposition in a bid to guarantee free and fair elections. As crude production edged up to 800,000 bpd in the first quarter of 2024, oil executives from around the world flocked to Caracas, eyeing partnerships with state-owned refineries in spite of the severely decayed infrastructure.

But politically the move did not pay off. A passionate and battle-hardened Machado won the opposition primaries with a landslide in October 2023, drawing 2.4mn voters to the polls, pointing to a sign of popular hope that unsettled the regime. Maduro-aligned courts promptly upheld a previous conviction on murky corruption charges, banning her from holding office for 15 years. Security forces blacklisted Machado from domestic and international flights, doubled down on repression by arresting hundreds of opposition figures linked to her and even began shutting down restaurants where she was spotted dining.

At the same time, in a bid to shore up support by tapping into nationalistic sentiments rooted in a century-old border dispute, Maduro called for a snap referendum on the annexation of the oil-rich Essequibo region, which makes up two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana.

Washington reacted by reimposing oil sanctions in April, citing Maduro’s inability to live up to his promises.

After announcing the election date in March, the government-aligned National Electoral Council (CNE) rejected the replacement candidacy of 80-year-old academic Corina Yoris as the unitary opposition pick.

For some reason, however, Gonzalez managed to register just in time as the opposition placeholder and be accepted by the CNE; after some weeks of hesitancy, he gained the crucial support of Machado.

He is now poised to win the upcoming election with 59.1% of voter intention, according to a study conducted by the Centre for Political and Government Studies at Andrés Bello Catholic University (CEPyG-UCAB) and the pollster Delphos.

In contrast, Maduro has seen his support merely increase to 25%, up from the 19% with which he began his campaign.

Even if elections were to be rigged, these numbers are devastating for the Chavista regime, as historic strongholds appear to be turning against it. Speculation abounds over whether Maduro will relinquish power peacefully, pull a last-minute trick such as election delays or tactical disqualifications, or order a mass crackdown on innocent citizens.

The last two options, however, would leave him totally isolated, as his traditionally friendly neighbours Colombia and Brazil increasingly voice concerns over Venezuela’s democratic backsliding and appear unwilling to come to his aid, be it militarily or diplomatically. Most remarkably, Brazilian President Lula recently admitted to being frightened by Maduro’s warnings of a “bloodbath” if he loses the vote, reiterating his calls for a free election.

His strongest allies on the global stage, Beijing and Moscow, are unlikely to support him, either. China – which stopped issuing loans to Venezuela in 2016, fed up by the latter’s inability to pay back – might actually see a more competent administration with favour. Neither Machado nor Gonzalez ever expressed reservations or hostility towards Beijing, which is still owed over $10bn.

Russia, for its part, is engaged in an existential battle with Ukraine and the West and its support cannot realistically go beyond a few warships theatrically docking in Havana or La Guaira in Venezuela.

On the internal front, when faced with crackdown orders the Venezuelan military may well decide to break ranks with the regime, and instead support the formation of a new government.

All bets are off. Something, though, is moving behind the diplomatic scenes.

A recent resumption in talks with Washington, much trumpeted by Maduro as a means to “overcome this conflict with the north” and described as “frank and cordial” by his campaign manager, strongly points to a different scenario.

As he shows up at rallies across the nation draped in superhero cloaks, the incumbent may be negotiating his way out with the US, perhaps including an amnesty deal or a framework of transitional justice in exchange for a smooth transfer of power.

In an interview with the CSIS earlier this year, even the normally hawkish Machado appeared open to such a possibility, hinting at ongoing contacts with parts of the Chavista regime.

Will Maduro cling on to power again, faced with what seems like an inevitable defeat? How strong really is his determination – and pride – as he grows increasingly isolated on the regional and global stage? Could he seize on this last opportunity to partly redeem his unflattering reputation?

We will know later this week, as the world’s spotlight is on Caracas. But this time the Venezuelan people’s yearn for change is real, and never has been livelier. It will not end without a fight.