On the evening of Sunday, July 28, Venezuelan migrants across the United States poured into the streets in celebration. The presidential election had concluded and exit polls showed opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzales more than doubling the vote of incumbent Nicolas Maduro, winning 65% to 31%. Their mood was deflated a few hours later when the official election results declared Maduro the winner, 51% to 44%.

A team of 30,000 election witnesses assembled by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado reported Gonzales winning with 70% of the vote. Venezuela’s Public Prosecutor Tarek William Saab responded accusing Machado of plotting electoral sabotage. The day after the elections, protesters, some armed, blocked highways with burning tires, and occupied the Caracas international airport. The opposition called for “citizens assemblies” across the country to defend democracy, while the Maduro government cracked down with waves of arrests. Machado is currently in hiding, saying she fears for her life.

Opposition figures like Gonzales and Machado are no friends of working people. They stand for privatizing Venezuela’s oil industry and social services and selling them to the highest bidder. For all their current championing of democracy, they’re long implicated in failed coups and undemocratic maneuvers. This makes it all the more dangerous that they’ve been able to win growing support from the Venezuelan working class, at home and abroad, and that Maduro is increasingly relying on state repression to stay in power.

Maduro was the successor to Hugo Chavez, the popular left-populist president first elected in 1998. Chavez kicked off Latin America’s original “pink tide” and earned the wrath of Venezuela’s ruling class and US imperialism. Propelled to power by mass support, Chavez carried out significant reforms, but he kept the bulk of the economy in private hands. While Chavez’s supporters were able to fend off coups and lockouts, Chavez’s reforms weren’t sustainable on the basis of capitalism.

Shortly after Maduro assumed power in 2013, a drop in oil prices took away the main financial buttress for Chavez’s and Maduro’s reforms. The economy slid into crisis, with hyperinflation peaking at 130,060% in 2018. This allowed the right-wing opposition to regroup. In recent years, Maduro was able to partially stabilize the economy, but on the basis of intense austerity measures and deals with oil companies like Chevron. With mass support declining, the state became Maduro’s main apparatus for fending off right-wing attacks.

Maduro’s transparent maneuvering and reliance on state repression is a sign of the decline of a once-popular movement, and can only serve as a gift to the right. Even though the right is the most public target of Maduro’s state repression, he has also wielded it against the left and the workers’ movement.

Capitalist apologists hold up Venezuela as a cautionary tale about the dangers of socialism. But Venezuela’s current crisis is the product of the failure of reforming capitalism. The right-wing opposition, in spite of their newfound popularity, are a danger to Venezuelan workers. But Maduro is a dead-end. The way out of the crisis is an independent working-class struggle rooted in international solidarity.

• For an independent working-class way out of the Venezuelan crisis – no trust in the reactionary and pro-imperialist right, no illusion in Maduro’s pro-capitalist and repressive government!
• Defend democratic rights and freedoms – no to repression by the government and no to right-wing coups.
• Defend freedom of organization by the working class and the socialist left to combat the right and imperialism and win democratic and social rights.
• For an independent commission of workers’ organizations and social and democratic movements to audit the electoral process and guarantee free elections in which the working class and the socialist left can be represented!