Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro looks set to take the throne

“They are preparing for the coronation,” says a bakery manager in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, as teams of cleaners spruce up the streets outside. On January 10th Nicolás Maduro will be sworn in for his third term as president in the National Assembly’s building nearby. His inauguration will defy the popular will. In July a clear majority of Venezuelans voted against him, only for the electoral authority, which the regime controls, to declare that Mr Maduro had won the election with 52% of the vote.

It will not be the first time that he has donned the presidential sash amid controversy. The previous election, in 2018, was also a sham, with key opposition leaders barred from taking part. But this time the rigging went further. The opposition had collated and published tens of thousands of receipts from voting machines to prove that its candidate had won. All in vain. “We have to accept that Venezuela is about to become a full-blown dictatorship,” says a Western diplomat in Caracas.

In protest, most European governments will send no representative to the ceremony. Even countries in the region that were once sympathetic, including Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, will not be represented at a high level. All are expected to send only their resident ambassadors. The United States, which has had no diplomatic relations with Venezuela’s government since 2019, will be absent.

Other regional autocrats, such as the presidents of Cuba and Nicaragua, will almost certainly turn up. President Vladimir Putin will be represented by Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Duma, Russia’s parliament. China, Iran and Turkey will probably send special envoys. Foreign leftist “solidarity” organisations have been invited to Caracas for an “anti-fascism conference” that will coincide with the inauguration. The regime will cite their presence as proof of international support.

The real winner of the election, Edmundo González, who is 75, left the country for exile in Spain in September. According to the opposition’s count, this previously little-known former ambassador won 67% of the vote to Mr Maduro’s 30%. Since January 4th he has embarked on a tour of friendly nations in the Americas, including Argentina, Uruguay and the United States, where he held talks with President Biden. He has pledged to return to his home country in time for what should have been his own inauguration. “I’ll be back to Venezuela by land, air or sea,” he promised on December 17th. Mr González was a stand-in for the hugely popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, whom the regime banned from running, but she still rallied millions of anti-regime voters.

Ms Machado is in hiding in Venezuela, but she has promised to appear at a mass anti-regime rally she is calling for on January 9th, the eve of the inauguration. On January 7th she said the rally would be an “historic day for Venezuela and the region…anyone who joins this cause is saved from the justice that awaits this tyranny”. Throughout December she issued a series of recorded audio and video messages reminding Venezuelans of what they had achieved on election day. In one of them she directly addressed the army and police, calling on them to defect to her side.

All this is reminiscent of 2019, when the then head of the elected National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, called for mass protests on the streets. Mr Guaidó had been recognised as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by the United States and around 60 other countries, on the basis that Mr Maduro had usurped power. Mr Guaidó even managed to convince Donald Trump’s administration that Venezuela’s army was ready to defect. A small uprising took place, but only a few dozen soldiers actually joined Mr Guaidó. The effort fell flat.

The emperor has no clothes

Now the Maduro regime taunts the opposition, saying that Mr González will be just another Mr Guaidó. That does not wash. Unlike Mr Guaidó, Mr González can rightly claim to have been directly elected Venezuela’s leader by popular vote. The July election has exposed Mr Maduro’s deep unpopularity, and his regime’s willingness to commit fraud. “They have been unmasked,” says Luisa, a teacher in Caracas.

That does not mean the regime’s fall is imminent. The army is still the ultimate arbiter of power in Venezuela. There has been no sign that its generals, who have long profited from Mr Maduro’s crony capitalism, intend to drop their loyalty to him. So far the lower ranks, who are heavily spied on, seem to have had little opportunity to plot a takeover. At the end of December, 162 of the 1,794 political prisoners in Venezuela were from the armed forces, according to Foro Penal, a local human-rights group.

A massive street protest could topple the regime, but doubts remain whether demoralised Venezuelans are prepared to take the risk. Hours after the government announced its victory in July, tens of thousands went out to demonstrate. The regime’s response was swift. In the following days around 2,000 people, including more than 100 teenagers, were jailed. There have been no big public demonstrations since. In August Mr Maduro appointed the feared boss of the ruling Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello, as interior minister, a move seen as giving a green light to more repression. A law to punish those who voice support for international sanctions against the country was approved in November, with penalties of up to 30 years in prison and confiscation of all property. Military checkpoints have been stepped up nationwide. Opposition figures have been swept up and jailed by regime goons. On January 7th Mr Gonzalez said that his son-in-law had been kidnapped. All foreigners are questioned in detail at border entry points. Mr Diosdado has boasted that more than 120 “mercenaries”, many of them foreigners, have been detained.

So it remains probable that Mr Maduro will be reinaugurated without serious obstacles. But that will not end his problems. Ten days later Donald Trump will be inaugurated in Washington. Although he has yet to meet or endorse Mr González, his choices for his foreign-policy team point to a hard line against Mr Maduro.

Marco Rubio, nominated as secretary of state, is a Cuban-American and fierce opponent of the region’s three current leftist dictatorships. Christopher Landau, the nominee for deputy secretary of state, knows Venezuela well—his father was ambassador there in the early 1980s—and is a vocal critic of the regime. Another hawk, Mauricio Claver-Carone, has been named as Mr Trump’s special envoy to Latin America. He was an architect of the United States’ recognition of Mr Guaidó as president and planned “maximum pressure” on Venezuela in the first Trump administration; sweeping sanctions were then imposed on the country’s oil and finance sectors. Joe Biden’s administration lifted some of them as part of negotiations in 2023 whereby the regime agreed that fairer elections would be held.

Some have speculated that Mr Trump’s instinct this time round might be to do a deal, perhaps one in which the Maduro regime accepts Venezuelans deported from the United States in exchange for the continuation of looser oil sanctions. But if the maxim that “personnel is policy” holds water, that seems unlikely. Mr Trump’s appointments suggest that his administration has already decided that the only viable solution for Venezuela is one where Mr Maduro is dethroned. What is not yet clear is how Mr Trump hopes to do it. ■

Editor’s note (January 7th 2025): This story was updated.

Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region.