The majority opposition of Venezuela resumed the route of abstention by deciding not to participate in the regional and legislative elections of last May 25, as it did 20 years ago, when it withdrew from the contest to elect deputies, although this time in a scenario in which it questions the legitimacy of President Nicolás Maduro.

“When the adversary withdraws from the field, from the field, one advances and takes the ground and exercises it,” Maduro said after the votes a week ago, in which only a group of opponents participated who ignored the guideline of the anti-Chavista majority, sheltered by the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), headed by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia.

Maduro brought up what happened in 2005, when, he said, the opposition called for “total abstention.”

“And well,” added the Chavista leader, “they gave us the National Assembly (AN, Parliament) and the National Assembly 2005-2010 was the most fruitful there was.”

20 years ago, Chavismo took the 167 seats of Parliament before the complete withdrawal of the main opposition parties, which expressed distrust in the voting system.

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This time, the PUD refused to attend these elections by denouncing fraud in the presidential elections of July last year, in which the National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed the victory of the president, of which the disaggregated results have not yet been disseminated. The anti-chavismo insists that the winner was its candidate, González Urrutia.

Machado and González Urrutia see the abstention of May 25 as an “act of dignity”.

The former deputy considered the abstention as a fourth “victory” of the opposition, after the 2023 primaries, of which she described as “crushing” the election of González Urrutia as – she said – “president” in 2024 and of the so-called ‘Operation Guacamaya’, in allusion to the departure from the country this month of five anti-Chavistas who were refugees, since March last year, in the residence of the Argentine Embassy in Caracas.

Despite the majority call, an opposition group detached itself from the PUD and ran in the May 25 votes, in which it achieved 11 deputies to Parliament compared to 253 of 285 with which the ruling party remained.

In this regard, the political scientist and deputy director of the Gumilla Center, Piero Trepiccione, told EFE that the 2005-2025 scenarios are “very different.”

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“At that time, the forces that politically supported those in power in Venezuela had a lot of popular support, they controlled Venezuelan public opinion, they had superior support, even 60%, the polarization environment was much greater, more tense, harder,” he described.

In his opinion, the country was in the process of consolidating the “hyper-leadership” of then-President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) and the opposition “was trying to understand that dynamic, those new power dynamics that emerged in the country from 1999, with the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez”.

“Of course,” said this expert, “that it was a decision that (with) time proved to be a mistake, because it was effectively not possible to obtain a minimum participation that would have been important at that time and that would have served as a tribune for the necessary institutional counterweights.”

And that wasn’t the only time. Anti-Chavism also withdrew from the 2018 presidential elections and the 2020 parliamentary elections, with which the ruling party regained the majority of the House after having lost it in 2015.

For the five-year period 2026-2031, Chavismo ensured, in addition to the parliamentary majority, 23 of 24 governors in the country.

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Trepiccione considers that the majority anti-Chavism has, in terms of leadership, a “great reference” in the figure of Machado, but “it has again fallen into a rather serious process of fragmentation and dispersion.”

Therefore, he believes that a process of reorganization, restructuring and reunion is necessary “in terms of recovering positioning in the territory” and taking advantage of “those great expectations that there are in the country”.

“If the opposition manages to articulate forces, realign itself with that desire for change, give political directionality to that desire for change; without a doubt, it can quickly become an important counterweight in the political process that is being lived in the country,” he added.

The political scientist clarifies that the discussion must go beyond an election. “Here the issue is how to unify a strategy, how to build a joint strategy and how not to fall into the provocation of fragmentation,” he reflected.

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