After
weeks of imperialist threats and opposition violence, the elections
for the Constituent Assembly (ANC) in Venezuela took place on July
30th. The result was a massive turnout of over 8 million voters,
around 41% of the electorate, which gave chavismo a much-needed shot
in the arm. The western media reacted by trying to dispute the number
and sticking even closer to the narrative being pushed by the
opposition and the US State Department. With the opposition
scrambling and US authorities bringing more sanctions and threats, it
is now chavismo that has the political initiative. The Constituent
Assembly will not solve everything by itself, but it is a tremendous
opportunity to push the Bolivarian Revolution forward.
Part
4 - Lessons in democracy and international recognition
The pressure
and propaganda against Venezuela in recent weeks were centred on the
idea that the simple fact of these elections taking place would mean
the “end of democracy” and the definitive arrival of a
“dictatorship”. Often absent from these pieces is the fact that
everyone could vote and anyone could stand as a candidate.
But beyond
this we encounter the obvious question of why Venezuela should get
lessons in democracy or electoral procedures from the likes of the
United States. Intellectual Gore Vidal famously said that “There
is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it
has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”
The fact
that Brazil (!) complained about the legitimacy of this process shows
that an unexpected victim of last year’s parliamentary coup, which
brought Temer to power, was irony.
When it
became clear that the Venezuelan government was not going to back
down and the vote was going ahead, the tone changed slightly. The US,
the European Union and the usual suspects (Argentina, Mexico,
Colombia,…) now announced they would not recognise the election
results. Here it is worth recalling a few episodes of international
recognition:
– the US
initially refused to recognise the results of the 2013 Venezuelan
presidential election, even after it was proven beyond any doubt that
Maduro was the winner.
– the US
and Spain rushed to recognise Pedro Carmona’s government after the
2002 coup, even though the coup authorities dissolved all public
powers.
– European
countries and later the US recognised an unelected body, chosen by
delegates appointed by the various sponsors of the Syrian war, and
operating in Turkey, as “the legitimate representative of the
Syrian people”. This body would later be consigned to irrelevance.
To these we
could add a multitude of leaders who came to power following bloody
or back-door coups, from Pinochet to Temer, and never had any trouble
being “recognised”. The Israeli apartheid regime has no issues in
terms of recognition despite its permanent history of crimes and
ethnic cleansing. So there is hardly any correlation between
legitimacy and recognition from the US and its followers.
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