Steel heir María Corina Machado wants to lead the opposition after Guaidó’s flop.
(Bloomberg) — A conservative firebrand is seeking to take Venezuela’s political opposition in a radically different tack as she seeks to end two decades of socialist rule.
María Corina Machado, a 55-year-old former lawmaker whose father’s steel company was seized by the late Hugo Chávez, has ridden a surge in popularity to lead a pack of candidates ahead of the Oct. 22 primary vote that will decide who gets to take on President Nicolás Maduro in next year’s elections. To get on the ballot, she needs to convince followers of a fractured coalition dominated by leftist parties that a right-winger who wants to privatize the oil industry is the best person to end the autocratic movement known as Chavismo and revive an economy battered by one of history’s worst recessions.
It’s a tough challenge, to say the least, but anti-Maduro forces clinging to hopes that international observers are able to oversee free and fair elections next year see the vote as the best opportunity to wrest back control of the country. A multi-year effort to depose the president and install the former head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, failed spectacularly despite the support of the US, UK and much of the global community.
“There is an opportunity to transform the country, to attract huge investments that translate into employment, education, innovation and into quality of life for Venezuelans,” Machado said. “For that to happen we need a 180-degree shift from what there is today, because we have understood that socialism equals ruin.”
It’s quite a turnaround for a politician who called for a complete boycott of the last presidential election in 2018, saying there was no point in participating in the rigged system that spurred the US and other countries to impose economic sanctions. Once critical of any concession to opponents, she now approaches potential allies across the political spectrum, looking to unite around their shared goal of ousting Maduro.
Machado’s efforts appear to be paying off as infighting among other leaders in the opposition intensifies. She was No. 1 among possible primary candidates with 25% support in a February poll from Datincorp, which also found her popularity had doubled over the past year. Other surveys show her similarly well positioned for the primary, and analysts say she stands a good chance of becoming Venezuela’s first female president if the country can mount a free and fair general election.
The opposition is ripe for new leadership following Guaidó’s disastrous gambit to win power, according to Félix Seijas, the head of Caracas-based pollster Delphos.
“The opposition as it existed is no longer, and that opens the door for her to capture support beyond her radical base,” Seijas said. “The ruling government is now the dominant adversary.”
In some respects, Machado is reintroducing herself to the Venezuelan public after half a decade out of the limelight. She had previously been one of the most prominent figures in the opposition when she led anti-government street protests. She is often remembered for interrupting a speech by Chávez to Congress in 2012 to criticize the damage he’d done to the Venezuelan economy.
“Águila no caza mosca,” Chávez responded in a video shared widely on social media, declining to engage. That phrase — roughly “eagles don’t chase flies” in English — became a rallying cry for Machado supporters in later years, especially for those who viewed the exchange as a powerful male politician dismissing a female counterpart as unworthy of debating. The regime took away her passport in 2014 amid allegations she’d tried to foment a coup against Maduro, an accusation frequently used against his critics.
Machado says she favors privatizing all industries in Venezuela, including oil, which many Venezuelans view as part of their heritage and see as rightfully belonging to the state. But she says rearranging the economy is the best bet for reversing years of decline — gross domestic product contracted 75% over the past 10 years as the national currency lost more than 90% of its value. Despite sitting atop the world’s largest crude reserves, oil production fell to about 660,000 barrels a day at the end of last year, far from the 2.9 million barrels a decade ago, according to data compiled by OPEC.
Machado, who operated a non-profit group dedicated to electoral transparency before she joined congress, comes from a wealthy family, a point frequently seized upon by her detractors. Her father’s company, Sivensa, was the nation’s second-biggest steelmaker when Chávez ordered the expropriation of its subsidiaries in 2010, an experience that helped firm up her belief that the state should largely stay out of the economy.
“It confirmed how destructive socialism and a government that seeks total control can be,” Machado said. “I also experienced firsthand, like thousands of Venezuelans, what it’s like to be robbed and looted by this regime.”
Machado’s rivals among the opposition — including Manuel Rosales, the Zulia state governor who registered almost twice her level of support in a Datanálisis poll from November — tend to be more left wing in their ideology. She has also come in for harsh criticism for statements that seemed to support a US military intervention in Venezuela in 2019 and 2020, when President Donald Trump was making vague threats about “all options” being on the table when it came to deposing Maduro.
Now, Machado’s message “resonates because it’s in opposition to the economic model, not the political model,” said Daniel Varnagy, a political science professor at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas. “She is the only one that advocates for the full restitution of private property and companies, as well as the elimination of controls in the economy.”
For his part, Maduro has taken notice of Machado’s momentum, calling her a “threat against stability” in September.
“Do we want a privatized country belonging to the oligarchies, or a country at peace that advances toward the guarantee of collective rights?” he asked in a nationally televised address from the presidential palace.
Machado invokes her own family’s experience when trying to make the case to voters that Venezuela needs a radical change. More than 7 million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years to seek a better life, and Machado points out that her own children have also fled the country — albeit in much more privileged conditions that most of her countrymen stuck overseas.
“People are tired of socialism. They don’t want gifts, they want to be able to be productive and live with dignity, to own their destiny,” Machado said. “Today, one thing unifies us all, and that’s to be reunited as families.”
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