Venezuela post-election scenario memo - 30 July 2024

Edmundo Gonzalez won the election. Maduro is trying to steal it. Here are the scenarios in which change occurs.

Yesterday, the Venezuelan opposition announced it has possession of 73% of the actas showing the vote totals for locations around the country. The totals (rounded) are 6.3 million votes for Edmundo Gonzalez and 2.8 million for Nicolas Maduro. The opposition won in every state. They won in precincts that previously voted heavily in favor of the Chavistas. It is a mathematical impossibility for Maduro to have won the election given that data. The opposition will post all its evidence online to be reviewed by international observers, who should be able to confirm that Gonzalez won. The CNE is obligated to post the same data for 100% of the voting precincts, but they haven't done so because they are complicit in covering up Maduro's loss.

The CNE announced Maduro is the winner of the election by a completely made up 51-44 number. Maduro appears to have the support of the top civilian and military leadership. There are still layers of repressive forces around him.

The main questions I've received in the past 24 hours are "does Maduro leave?" and "how does Maduro leave?"

Similar to my pre-election scenarios (I posted a summary here; some clients have a longer memo), you can divide the potential scenarios into three buckets that aren't completely mutually exclusive, but close enough for this exercise. There are plenty of sub-scenarios underneath each bucket, some better than others.

Status quo: Maduro holds on to power

Change: Someone else takes over the presidency

Chaos: Control is contested for months to come

0. Status quo remains a likely outcome. Maduro has the tools of repression. He has survived previous waves of protests, controversial elections, and attempts to oust his government.

From a prediction model standpoint, call it the tyranny of base rates of tyranny. Consolidated dictatorships survive everything until they reach a peak moment of crisis or a very specific set of circumstances (usually involving security forces suddenly turning against them). So prediction models rarely tip to >50% likely to fall in the next 12 months because the past precedent is that they survive more often than they crash. Usually, there are only a few days or weeks of warning before the transition comes.

But dictatorships do crash sometimes, even when the odds are against that happening. And some indicators are flashing red in Venezuela including the mass protests that hit the streets yesterday. Part of the reason I'm writing this memo today is that I'm working through the question whether Maduro will stay or go.

Scenarios for change

So let's talk about the scenarios everyone wants to hear about in which change comes to the country. How does change come to Venezuela? What indicators would show that change is more likely?

There are five basic scenarios in which Maduro loses power in the next six months, in order of most to least likely:

1. Maduro accepts defeat in the election. If change does surprisingly come in Venezuela in the coming months, it's most likely from this scenario.

The immediate criticism of this scenario is "But he already claimed victory!?!?!" Yes, but he can change his mind. Pressure from protests and the international community can force Maduro to admit that the CNE recount shows he actually lost the election. At that point, a negotiation takes place that likely grants him amnesty, gives the military some promises of stability, and gives the Chavistas some sort of power-sharing arrangement. Maduro goes for an extended beach vacation in Cuba.

The reason this is the most likely change scenario is that it is a semi-dignified exit that protects the interests of those in power and those in the region. This scenario is almost exactly the same as the unlikely but possible scenarios discussed before the election in which Maduro accepts the loss (the same way authoritarians lost elections in Nicaragua, Chile, and Honduras), just a week or two later than scheduled. It's the change scenario that Venezuela's neighbors would like to see, vs the other four scenarios below are the ones they want to avoid.

One thing standing in this scenario's way is that the Chavistas have lost some leverage with the mass vote against them and the protests. They would have been better off negotiating three months ago, but hubris led them to a massive election defeat and then an attempt to hold on while tens of thousands took the streets. They won't get as much in a transition negotiation now as they would have gotten before.

To be clear: This is the scenario we should all want to happen! This is the scenario I want to happen. Everyone in the international community right now should be pushing for Maduro to change his mind and accept electoral defeat and a transition. That would be the most stable outcome for Venezuela and the one that leads to improving the country in the coming years. The pressure should be on the Chavista civilian and military leadership around Maduro to convince them that this is the correct next step. As ugly as it is and even if he doesn't deserve it, the international community and Maduro's domestic opponents should be willing to offer lots of incentives for him to leave.

2. Military coup. Security force defection is the top way dictators leave power globally. There are two ways this military coup happens.

First, Vladimir Padrino Lopez says, "time is up" and leads a unified group of military commanders to toss out Maduro. At that point, Padrino begins talking with other actors to figure out who the next civilian president is and that person gets to be civilian president as long as they promise to not turn on the military commanders who committed the coup. This seems unlikely at the moment as Venezuela's minister of defense has said he respects Maduro's electoral victory, but like Maduro, he can change his mind.

Second, if the top generals refuse to flip, several units led by a lower ranking officer make the attempt. The DGCIM (Cuba-backed military counter-intelligence) exists to prevent this second coup scenario. They make it very hard for lower level units to coordinate a rebellion and shut down whispers of coups very early. But if enough units defected at the same time, the coordination could come about organically.

One warning: military coups usually don't lead to democratic governments. They usually lead to more military coups and dictatorships. The theory that the military steps in, forces Maduro out, then hands the leadership to Edmundo Gonzalez and steps back from politics as a democratic transition consolidates is an idealized world that rarely occurs. That's why a coup is less ideal than Maduro accepting defeat. It spills over into the chaos scenarios.

3. Protests plus security force indifference. Whether coordinated from the top or not, if the security forces stop repressing protesters, the protesters can take over government installations and toss out Maduro and his allies. There are layers of repression managed by multiple institutions (as Javier Corrales explained on Twitter yesterday). In yesterday's protests, colectivos and plain-clothed police officers were the ones firing bullets into the crowds of protesters, giving them some level of impunity from prosecution. Similar to the lower level military coup scenario, the DGCIM and other institutions prevent security forces from coordinating their actions, making it very dangerous for any single unit to refuse to repress protesters. The military isn’t the main actor in this effort and cannot control the repression from the top down.

Globally, protests against dictatorships used to work but haven't succeeded after Arab Spring. Dictatorships have gotten their repressive mechanisms in order. Nicaragua, where Ortega and his security forces killed protesters until they were forced to give up, is a brutal case in point for the region. It would be great for Venezuela to be a rare counter-example of protests succeeding at tossing out a dictator, but not something I would bet on.

4. Assassination or Accident. While a systemic military coup is the bigger threat, Maduro needs to be concerned about rogue officers or even civilians who can get close to him. Once again, there are plenty of security forces in place to attempt to prevent this scenario. While I'm sure some people would cheer, it's a bad scenario for any transition as it leaves a power vacuum and potentially encourages retaliatory violence down the line.

5. International intervention. Nobody is advocating for this at the moment. The only two ways this occurs are 1) Maduro crosses an international border and tries to invade a neighboring country (I wrote about why that is unlikely late last year) or 2) Maduro commits an abuse so horrific that the international community is forced to step in under a responsibility to protect framework. Neither of these scenarios seems possible at the moment and I think Maduro understands the red lines he needs to respect to avoid this scenario.

What about the chaos scenarios?

I’m not dealing with this category today other than to say many of the change scenarios I outlined above would have fallen into my pre-election memo's chaos scenarios. I've moved the bar on these definitions post-election. There remain some concerning scenarios involving long term civil conflict, but I'm more focused today on the immediate question of whether the Maduro regime stays or goes.

What should happen in the coming days?

At the top of this newsletter, I noted that the opposition has the evidence to prove they won the election. This is where the international community's focus should be for the next few days. Demand the CNE release the vote totals. But as the CNE refuses to do so, count the vote receipts the opposition is holding as evidence. The receipts demonstrating with mathematical certainty that Maduro lost the election are a big hit to his legitimacy, well beyond the more complicated (but accurate!) claims of past stolen elections.

Pause to appreciate the irony that the electoral system put in place by Hugo Chavez included a verification mechanism to prevent stolen elections and that verification mechanism (the printed actas at each voting site) is now functioning to prove that Chavez's successor stole an election.

There are going to be protests and those protests will face violent repression. On top of demanding election results, the international community must inform Maduro that it is watching the repression and send messages that they are monitoring specific actors. Perpetrators and authors of violence will be held responsible. Convincing any sector of the security forces to stop repression or to reconsider their loyalty can help Maduro realize that his best exit is one he negotiates rather than one that is forced upon him at gunpoint.

So what’s the prediction?

I don’t have a new specific public prediction right this moment. I made my public prediction pre-election with the information I had at that moment and I think it was a good one and not yet resolved. The situation is fluid enough right now that any updated prediction I write in the newsletter might be out of date by the end of the day.

Even if the prediction models say Maduro is favored to hold on, oppositions win by fighting against the odds. Their bravery is humbling and their execution of a strategy to get this far has been impressive. To the extent I can advocate for change, I will. I’m not an unbiased analyst. I’m happy to say I’m biased on the issue of hoping for and working towards a democratic Venezuela.

For those in Venezuela who have helped inform my knowledge of events in recent days and my analysis of these scenarios, stay safe.