The PSUV won a majority of deputies to the National Assembly, with the AD winning 3 deputies, and UNT-Única another 3 deputies (namely Henrique Capriles, co-founder of the Justice First party, and their former candidate in the 2012/13 presidential elections). The government won 23 governorships out of 24, including that of Essequibo Guyana (the disputed territory claimed by both Guyana and Venezuela, but internationally recognized as part of Guyana. Following a referendum in December of 2023, a new law was passed in 2024 designating the region as a new state). It regained the governorships of Zulia, Nueva Esparta and Barinas, while the bourgeois opposition retained Cojedes state.
The most striking aspect of these elections is the very high abstention rate. The CNE put them at just under 58%, but the truth is that the images that went viral on social networks showed the alarming absence of voters in all polling stations across the country.
According to some polls, the unofficial abstention rate is said to be around 80%, or even as high as 85%. If the government itself speaks of a voter turnout of less than 43%, surely the abstention was much higher. In the weeks leading up to the elections, the population’s disinterest was already manifest, and contrasted with the great willingness to vote that was evident in the days leading up to the presidential elections in July of last year.
María Corina Machado and her supporters want to claim a supposed triumph with the high abstention rate. They want to make people believe that this was the result of their call not to vote. In fact, the high abstention was an expression of the weariness and genuine discontent that nestles in the heart of the people. It was a manifestation of repudiation of the government, and of disbelief in the electoral system. People did not vote because someone told them not to, but simply because they do not see any possibility of change in the country’s political and social situation through the electoral process.
The bosses’ opposition, led by María Corina Machado and her allies, sowed false expectations in the elections of July 28th, 2024. In a process that, from the moment it was called, was full of irregularities, advantage taking, disqualifications, and a great deal of repression and persecution.
This opposition demobilised the discontent that was expressed the day after the elections, which was convenient for the dictatorial government of Maduro. In those elections, the fraud was blatant, and for the recent elections, the same anti-democratic conditions persisted, aggravated by the effects of the brutal repression following the previous ones.
In this way the government consummated a new fraud, controlling all the instruments of the political regime, with the aim of staying in power against all odds.
From the Socialism and Freedom Party, we affirm that only with struggle, with united and massive mobilisation, will we be able to recover the democratic freedoms that have been violated, achieve free and transparent elections, win the freedom of political prisoners, and defeat the adjustment plan that Maduro is applying in agreement with the bosses.
Only with our mobilisation, independent of the government and the bosses’ opposition in all its variants, will we be able to impose a workers’ and popular emergency plan to respond to all the serious ills that afflict the working people.