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Tamara Taraciuk Broner, director of the Rule of Law Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, spoke with NPR alongside election watchers from Ghana and Georgia, regarding Venezuela’s upcoming presidential election in late July, in a year when countries accounting for more than half the world’s population will also be holding elections.
COMMENTS FROM TARACIUK BRONER:
“It’s impossible to see Venezuelan elections as free and fair today. You have a context in which millions of people have been forced to flee. […] There continues to be repression against political opposition, against critics more broadly. However, this is a very important moment for Venezuela because despite an ongoing humanitarian emergency and continued targeted repression, people want to vote. So, this makes this election critical, even if the conditions are very far from free and fair.”
“In the region, there has been a tendency over the past few years of voting against the incumbent, because what we see is people wanting to find responses by the governments to their basic needs […]. In Venezuela, however, what I am seeing is that the situation is so bad, that the government is even losing the bases that it’s always had in elections, and there is a big opportunity for democracy to win. The question now is, will this election provide an opportunity to bring the country back to the path to a transition to democracy?”
