Anne Applebaum writes:

Late last year, Venezuela’s democratic opposition set out to choose, jointly, someone who could challenge Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocratic president, in an election that was sure to be violent and unfair. Hundreds of thousands of participants from different political parties voted in a primary held across Venezuela and in exile communities abroad. Although they risked harassment and arrest, people donated space in private homes and offices to make the vote possible. Others stood in line for hours, in parks and plazas, to choose the victor, María Corina Machado. Machado’s career began when she founded an election-monitoring group more than two decades ago, and she has since then served as a member of the National Assembly, as a party leader, and as a persistent voice in favor of international sanctions on the regime. The Venezuelan leadership responded, over many years, by repeatedly accusing her of conspiracy, treason, and fraud, even banning her from leaving the country.

After Machado won the primary, Maduro’s regime also barred her from running for president, and then blocked a substitute candidate; finally it allowed the opposition to nominate a retired diplomat, Edmundo González. Instead of weakening, the civic movement gathered speed. Having pulled off the feat of the primary, Machado and her colleagues trained more than 1 million volunteers to protect the election itself, which was scheduled for July 28. At thousands of workshops held all over the country, they prepared to monitor the polling stations, report irregularities using a secure app, collect the tally sheets produced by each voting machine, upload them to a secure website—and do all this in locations with generators, to ensure they could not be stopped by deliberate power cuts.

The result: The opposition won with about two-thirds of the vote. More to the point, González’s supporters could prove they had won, thanks to the tally sheets that were posted online. A few days after that vote, I talked with opposition leaders who thought the voting results were so definitive that Maduro would have to concede.

He did not. Five months have passed. González is living in exile in Spain. Machado is still in Venezuela, but in hiding. I spoke with her twice in recent days by Zoom, once as part of an online event organized by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University (where I am a senior fellow) and once alone. I don’t know her location.

In my own location—sometimes in Europe, sometimes in the U.S.—I am in the center of what feels like a tidal wave of pessimism about liberal democracy. The threats of Russian-military and Chinese-surveillance technology; the loss of faith in political institutions, scientific institutions, authorities of all kinds; the sense that social media is drowning all of us in nonsense; the rise of Elon Musk, an unaccountable oligarch whose money can influence political outcomes in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere—all of that means that we are ending 2024 at a moment when many of the inhabitants of what remain the planet’s freest, most prosperous societies don’t feel much optimism.

Machado, by contrast, lives in a brutalized country. Thanks to the regime’s misrule, Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, is now the poorest. Its citizens are malnourished and impoverished; more refugees have left Venezuela than Syria or Ukraine. And yet, Machado is optimistic. Not just “optimistic given the circumstances,” but truly optimistic.

During both of our conversations, Machado sat in front of a blank wall, with no other backdrop. Both times she was also calm, assured, even elegant. She didn’t look tired or stressed, or whatever a person who hadn’t seen her family or friends since July should look like. She wore makeup and simple jewelry. She sounded determined, positive. This is because, Machado told me, she believes that the campaign and its aftermath altered Venezuela forever, bringing about what she describes as “anthropological change.”

By this, she means that the grassroots political movement she and her colleagues created has transformed attitudes and forged new connections between people. The carefully organized primaries brought together old opposition competitors. Volunteer training gave hundreds of thousands of people a real experience not just of voting but of building institutions from scratch. Those efforts didn’t end with last summer’s election. [Continue reading…]