Alacranes vs G4 is the new political battle coming to Venezuela in the coming years. In the photo an alacran (scorpion) eatin slowly the MUD card used by G4 as its voting logo. Photo by lagranaldea.com.
Caracas, December 19, 2021 (OrinocoTribune.com)—In a hypothetical scenario of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) not running in the last Venezuelan regional elections held on November 21 in the country, the extreme right Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) alliance, aka G4, might have won 13 governor posts, while the less radical opposition alliance, pejoratively called “Alacranes” by G4 supporters, along with other opposition alliances might have won 10.
Orinoco Tribune has done a new analysis on the 21N regional elections with the figures currently available in the National Electoral Council (CNE) website, and found that in this very unlikely scenario the MUD alliance might have won governorships in the states of Amazonas, Apure, Bolívar, Carabobo, Cojedes, Falcón, La Guaira, Mérida, Monagas, Portuguesa, Trujillo, Yaracuy, and Zulia.
It must be highlighted here that Barinas state was not taken into account for the analysis, due to the ruling by the Venezuelan Supreme Court (TSJ) ordering new elections that are going to be held on January 9, despite the fact that the same TSJ ruling mentioned the victory trend of Freddy Superlano of MUD coalition. Additionally, it is important to highlight that in the CNE website currently there are inconsistencies in the numbers from Miranda, Sucre and Táchira states. In the case of Táchira the total number of votes for the victorious PSUV candidate in the homepage do not match with the total when the results for each state are filtered, and in the case of Táchira and Sucre such errors affect the numbers for the remaining political parties. This is something that needs to be addressed by CNE authorities. To solve those issues OT team calculated the real number of votes using the percentage of votes and the total votes of each state, assuming that the percentages are correct.
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In the analysis it was not easy to classify each alliance, because sometimes depending on the states certain alliances switch between the MUD, the “Alacranes” and for that reason we created another category called “Others” for those who did not apparently join either of the alliances. In that sense for MUD we understand mainly the parties supporting the MUD (card/party), meaning Convergencia and Un Nuevo Tiempo.
For “Alacranes” alliance we have considered Primero Venezuela, Acción Democrática, COPEI, Voluntad Popular, Venezuela Unida, Avanzada Progresista, El Cambio, Pro Ciudadanos and Cambiemos. In this category it is important to mention that Voluntad Popular and Acción Democrática belonging to this group are the representations of the splits within those parties, which led to a TSJ ruling allowing the forces not belonging to the extreme right to keep the institutional imagery (names and symbols) of those parties. Similar is the case of Primero Venezuela which is a split part of Primero Justicia, but this part was not able to retain the imagery like in the other two cases.
In the “others” category we have mainly considered the peculiar cases of the Capital District (Caracas) and Sucre state where the second place was obtained by politicians not clearly aligned with the other two groups and having enough local charisma to have been capable of discarding an alliance with the G4.
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Another relevant finding is related to the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) that in Portuguesa state, where they chose as candidate former PSUV governor Antonia Muñoz, got the fourth place with 10.68% of votes, but it was in alliance with MAS, Lapiz, UPP89 and Puente, all opposition parties more aligned with G4 (extreme right) than with “Alacranes.” This represented another error in a series of regrettable strategic mistakes committed by the PCV leadership, in addition to their meeting with the European Union observers days before the regional election.
Opposition victory by total votes might not be so accurate
Analyzing the data, Orinoco Tribune observed another interesting phenomenon which is related to a broad consensus among many analysts regarding the victory of the opposition in terms of total votes obtained in comparison with PSUV. In reality, the sum total of the votes obtained by the major opposition alliances (G4+Alacranes) only reached 45.3% of the votes cast, while PSUV received 54.7%. Even taking into account the votes in Capital District (Caracas), Barinas and Sucre states the Chavista alliance shows a clear victorious path in terms of number of votes.
Orinoco Tribune’s team did an analysis in this regard a few days after the 21N elections, but in that analysis the gross addition of all the votes of all opposition political parties was considered, which does show a clear vote majority for the opposition. However, taking into account the opposition alliances and how regional leaderships affect the totals, the picture changes, as the present analysis shows.
The analysis of the number of votes obtained by alliances also allowed us to see with greater clarity how the non-G4 anti-Chavista forces equalled the extreme right forces represented by the G4 in terms of getting votes. The G4 got 27.9% of the votes polled while “Alacranes” got 17.4% without adding the votes from Sucre and Capital District (Caracas).
This is a good representation of what many analysts consider as the loss of political capital by the G4 as a consequence of its erratic behavior on whether or not to participate in electoral contests as well as for being the representation of the US and European blockade that is repudiated by a majority of Venezuelans, irrespective of their political views. This contributed to the “Alacranes” having 10 governorships in the hypothetical scenario of the PSUV not running.
Featured image: Alacranes vs G4 is the new political battle within the Venezuelan opposition that may become interesting in the coming years. The photo shows an alacrán (scorpion) slowly eating the MUD card used by G4 as its voting logo. Photo: lagranaldea.com.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza
OT/JRE/SC
Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza
Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza is an expert in international relations, Venezuelan politics, and communication. He served for several years as Consul General of Venezuela in Chicago (United States); before that, he was part of the foundational editorial team of Aporrea.org. He is the founder and editor of the Venezuelan anti-imperialist news outlet Orinoco Tribune.
