BUENOS AIRES — Sunday’s sweeping opposition victory in Venezuela’s legislative elections may do little to lessen embattled President Nicolas Maduro’s hostility toward Washington, but it might well lead leftist governments across Latin America to moderate their policies and tone.
With the exception of a 2007 constitutional referendum, the vote marks the only time in 17 years that the followers of the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez have lost at the ballot box. With the final seats, the anti-Maduro Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) is approaching a supermajority in the National Assembly that could fundamentally challenge Mr. Maduro’s ability to lead.
It would be the first time since Chavez came to power in 1998 that the opposition controlled even one branch of the government.
While saying he respected the legitimacy of the result, Mr. Maduro quickly blamed the defeat on an “economic war” waged by a conservative “counterrevolution.” MUD leader Jesus Torrealba, meanwhile, called the triumph “historic” and promised a “time for change in Venezuela.”
The socialist president now confronts a scenario that gives his rivals wide-ranging powers — from ousting government officials to changing the country’s constitution, said Yorelis Acosta de Oliveira, a political scientist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas.
“The Chavez movement is in shock,” she said. “What remains of it is much debilitated.”
Going into Monday evening, the opposition coalition had won at least 99 seats in the incoming 167-seat legislature, electoral authorities and the ruling United Socialist Party won 46 seats. The opposition coalition needs to take 13 of the 22 still-to-be-called races to give it a two-thirds supermajority.
Henrique Capriles, a leader of the opposition and a former presidential candidate, said his coalition won at least 112 seats, but that claim was not confirmed.
Added Mr. Torrealba, “Venezuela wanted a change, and that change came. A new majority expressed itself and sent a clear and resounding message.”
The new, conservative-dominated legislature is expected to focus initially on internal issues such as Venezuela’s dire fiscal situation — including the world’s highest inflation rates — and a planned amnesty for political prisoners. Mr. Maduro will continue to set the country’s foreign policy, Ms. Acosta de Oliveira said.
Still, the opposition triumph swaps yet another tile in South America’s changing political mosaic already shuffled by last month’s center-right victory in Argentina’s presidential runoff, along with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment proceedings. It has not gone unnoticed in the continent’s capitals.
In Ecuador, leftist President Rafael Correa — whom Mr. Chavez counted among his closest allies — will continue to cool his relationship with Mr. Maduro and instead try to mend ties with neighbors Colombia and Peru, both of which are governed by center-right leaders, said Santiago Basabe of the Latin American Social Sciences Institute in Quito.
With an eye on his country’s 2017 presidential elections, Mr. Correa has already begun to box in his own foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, a leftist hard-liner instrumental in granting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Mr. Basabe said.
“To a certain extent, the [Venezuelan] elections will mark a turn in [our] foreign policy,” he said. “Correa’s policies are much more pragmatic that Maduro’s.”
Chavez movement’s future
Despite the ripple effect, it would be premature to eulogize the “socialism of the 21st century,” even in Mr. Maduro’s orthodox version, said Facundo Cruz, who teaches political science at the University of Buenos Aires. Sunday’s vote “might be the beginning of the end of the Chavez movement” he said, “but we don’t know that yet.”
Some of Mr. Maduro’s prominent leftist allies, including Cuban President Raul Castro and Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, even urged Mr. Maduro to redouble his efforts to pursue his agenda despite clear repudiation at the polls.
Mr. Ortega, in a letter for the Venezuelan president, noted the populist victories of Chavez and said, “As difficult at the horizon may appear, we have no doubt” that victories are in the future.
Cuba and Nicaragua have benefited from discount oil shipments from Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves. But the plunging price of oil on world markets, coupled with economic mismanagement at home, left Mr. Maduro and his party with record low political approval rates as Sunday’s vote approached.
Much will depend on the political skills of Venezuela’s famously divided opposition leaders, Mr. Cruz said. They need to avoid internal squabbles such as the ones that haunted their Argentine counterparts after their 2009 midterm victory — and that ultimately helped President Cristina Fernandez, another Maduro ally, score a landslide re-election in 2011.
Given Venezuela’s dramatic economic meltdown, both sides simply have to get along, Ms. Acosta de Oliveira said. “The Chavez movement will not disappear, nor does it need to disappear,” the political scientist said. But Mr. Maduro’s forces must learn to coexist with their rivals, she added.
In an ironic twist on the international front, Mr. Maduro’s defeat may help lessen the pressure on his government from foreign leaders who seem encouraged by the peaceful vote.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry released a statement in Washington that said the Venezuelan voters had expressed an “overwhelming desire for change,” but he also praised the Maduro government for running a largely peaceful and controversy-free election and called for a “dialogue among all parties in Venezuela” to address the country’s deep-seated woes.
Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was one of 157 lawmakers from the U.S. and five Central and South American nations who signed a pre-election letter calling on the Maduro government to guarantee a free vote.
“In electing a new majority to the National Assembly, Venezuelan voters have reinstated a long-absent legislative check on President Maduro’s to-date unrestrained exercise of executive power.”
Argentina’s foreign minister-designate, Susana Malcorra, announced Monday that Buenos Aires no longer plans to suspend Venezuela from the Mercosur trade bloc, as incoming President Mauricio Macri promised during his campaign last month.
“The elections have worked within what is established, and everything indicates that the results have been accepted by Maduro,” Ms. Malcorra said. “Nothing indicates that there will be a reason to invoke the [suspension],” she added.
Common Venezuelans affected by violent crime, hyperinflation and massive shortages of household goods, meanwhile, are hoping for pragmatic changes beyond political calculations, Ms. Acosta de Oliveira said.
“Venezuela has been crushed,” she said. “We owe ourselves a moment of reflection, of calm.”
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