Venezuela's Institutional Calvinball
The rules will change again before the election.
There are questions that we should have a hard time predicting:
Who will win the next election?
Which candidates will be nominated and appear on the ballot?
How many voters will turn out?
These questions are the reasons we hold elections. Voters get to decide. We shouldn't have perfect insights into the answers ahead of time.
Then there are questions that should have much clearer answers:
How is the date of the election decided?
How do candidates get on the ballot?
What are the rules for appealing decisions about election access?
The second set of questions is about institutional frameworks for the elections. The answers should be clearly written down and if there is a dispute about the rules (and disputes certainly occur in democracies), there should be a clear and fair mechanism to resolve the issue.
How these rules work often gets flipped around in dictatorships. We know the answers to some of the first set of questions but not the second. For example, we know who is going to win Russia's election in March because it's not competitive, but we don't know how the candidates get on the ballot because it's being decided at the whim of Putin, not the official institutional process that involves collecting signatures. Nicaragua's recent elections have looked similar, with the results predetermined and the legitimate opposition candidates detained just for attempting to run.
Venezuela's situation is awkward because both sets of questions are unknown. The situation is uncertain enough that there is no full guarantee that Maduro runs or that his party wins. Don't doubt that there is a possibility (even if it’s small) they could lose power due to the current election cycle, which is why they are nervous. But we also don't know the rules of the election. There is no official date of the election nor a clear process to determine that date. It will occur when the government announces it. It's not clear who from the opposition can appear on the ballot given the candidate bans. There is not a clear or fair appeal process for the current opposition leader to run.
Venezuela is in a state of "Institutional Calvinball", a situation where the governing rules are made up on the fly, not following the letter of the law or a clear precedent. In situations like this, it's difficult to predict what will happen next because there isn't even a clear set of rules for how or when or if an event will occur. I'm often asked, "Will Maria Corina Machado be the candidate for the opposition?" In a normal country, the prediction model would look at eligibility and support and legal challenges to her candidacy. In Venezuela, it's about an ongoing informal bargaining process and how strongly the two sides hold to their position. The legal theatrics and rulings are just a mirage to give an institutional fig leaf to what we all know is a process that has no set rules.
Maduro and his inner circle are concerned because the opposition is managing this abnormally well. Too many times in the past, the opponents of Chavismo would get frustrated by the constant breaking and making up of rules and simply refuse to play, which is a failing strategy. This time, they are rolling with the punches and even punching back, making up their own rules at times to overcome challenges; the opposition primary was unsanctioned by the regime and Machado pulled it off spectacularly.
This isn't the first time the opposition has attempted this. The events in 2019 with the naming of interim President Juan Guaido and the withdrawal of international recognition of Maduro by dozens of countries around the world was its own form of Calvinball. And though in hindsight it looks like failure was inevitable, I don't think analysts appreciate just how close the the opposition came to succeeding in the opening months of that effort.
Between 2019 and today, the world has normalized the weirdness of this. The Barbados agreement was a fake document from the moment it was signed. The negotiation clearly included things not in the document. Nobody believed Maduro would stick to the letter of the agreement. Nobody believed the timetable for if or how Maduro would be punished when he inevitably broke it. The Biden administration and various European governments have made statements about potential punishments and not followed through. That’s probably for the best, though they risk losing credibility about "red lines" if they aren't clearer about what specific breaking points would be.
Instead of trying to impose rules upon the chaos or demand rules in exchange for playing, the opposition and the world have agreed to play Calvinball with Maduro. Counter-intuitively, that may be increasing the challenge for Maduro. While dictatorships like having the authority to act on a whim and change the rules when needed, they also tend to impose lots of complicated bureaucracy and rules because it helps with control. Authoritarians threaten chaos because they want to impose order. When their opponents embrace the chaos, the risks are high for both sides.
I have predictions for what might happen regarding Venezuela in the next 24 months. So do many others. But the most important thing to understand is that those predictions shouldn't be based on some careful reading of the electoral rules or local laws or institutional frameworks or statements by foreign powers about if or how sanctions will be reimposed. Nobody should be asking, "What is the exact legal process for x to occur?" or "When will that actor follow through on their previous statement?" That's not how the game is being played. The rules will change again by next month.