Venezuela’s renewing light

An election Sunday may reflect the triumph over fear and division that Venezuelans have already gained.

The Monitor's View

Three months ago, Edmundo González Urrutia was still what he had always been – a soft-spoken and little-known career diplomat who, by his own admission, harbored no political ambitions. Yet on Sunday in Venezuela, he represents the hopes of voters seeking to end more than a quarter century of repressive autocratic rule.

Mr. González typifies more than just the possibility of a change in government. Polls show him winning by as much as 40% against incumbent President Nicolás Maduro. His improbable rise offers a study in how societies recover their ideals of freedom and democracy through humility and civic agency.

“Our commitment is to rebuild Venezuela ... so that political adversaries see each other as adversaries and not as enemies,” he told Le Monde. “My government will be one of reconstruction. Not one of vengeance.” 

Mr. González is a stand-in for the more popular and longtime opposition leader María Corina Machado. She was banned from holding public office for 15 years after winning a primary election last October with 93% of the vote. In March, Ms. Machado and other opposition leaders rallied behind Mr. González as her proxy.

That consensus marks a shift in how Venezuelans may emerge from a prolonged period marked by corruption, economic decline, and erosion of democratic principles under Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, the late leftist populist Hugo Chávez.

“Political leaders have put the good of the country before everything else and abandoned their ambitions in favor of a candidate who didn’t want to be one,” wrote José Toro Hardy, a Venezuelan economist, in Le Monde.

Ms. Machado and like-minded opponents once saw foreign intervention as critical to change. She gradually came to see that the real source of democratic renewal was in defusing the fear, division, and false patronage that autocracies depend on. “We have learned wonderful lessons,” she said in a TED Talk in 2011. “The first lesson is that we need collective empowerment to face fear and division. We went from disbelief to being [too] worried to protest, to activism.” 

Though banned from running for office or even sleeping in hotels or eating in restaurants, she has campaigned across the country without interruption – not just to promote Mr. González, but to strengthen a sense among ordinary Venezuelans that freedom is based on individual dignity and self-worth. While she shies away from expressing her faith in public, she has characterized that message as a “spiritual fight.”

Venezuela, wrote the writer and poet Pedro Varguillas Vielma in the magazine Nacla, is “a country in tatters, held together by its people.” If voters reject Mr. Maduro on Sunday, few see him leaving peacefully. That does not unsettle Mr. González and Ms. Machado. “Our strength is in redemption and unity,” she posted on the social platform X recently.  In one of the most troubled corners of Latin America, the light of democratic virtue is breaking through.