Venezuela: Rebirth and Electoral Victory of the Communist Party

By Thierry Deronne – Jul 14, 2025

For some years now, militants from all over the world have frequently received communiqués signed “Communist Party of Venezuela” denouncing “the neoliberal regime of Maduro, which persecutes communists, represses workers, crushes wages and sows terror among the working classes as fascism does”. Out of automatic solidarity, often in good faith, they relay these messages without suspecting the true nature of their author, nor understanding the disinformation in which they participate. In reality, the real Communist Party of Venezuela not only actively supports the Bolivarian revolution and groups the vast majority of its militants but has just obtained a historic result in the legislative elections of May 2025.

A bit of history…
Founded in 1931, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) never developed as the spearhead of the proletariat, but as one of the available niches of the pluralist facade desired by the oil oligarchy, somewhere between social democracy and Christian democracy. The eternal 1.5% of the PCV in the elections and its opportunism have had the gift of irritating, in turn, both Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

One of the problems of the pre-Chavez Left is that it was led by children of the bourgeoisie who, in a curious synthesis of colonialism and Marxism, saw the people as an “alienated mass to whom the political line must handed down”. Many dreamed of being the new Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, leaving behind a cemetery of martyrs, students, and peasant families sacrificed in the struggle and many severed hopes. Tired of never seeing the “great night” arrive, the people finally turned to someone who knew how to listen and talk to them: a certain Hugo Chavez.

At the prison to which his civil-military uprising against government corruption led him, the brown-skinned soldier of modest origins he comes to the understanding that the revolution will never come through that left-wing that was too much of a minority and was distant from the masses ; that the time had come to “dig up the dead seed of the mango to sow a new one” (1). His “Simon Bolivar National Project” resurrected three anti-colonial roots in popular memory: Bolivar, Rodriguez and Zamora. The alliance between civilians and military patriots recalled the kepi mounted on the peasant hat of Ezequiel Zamora, General of the “Free Lands and Men” (1817-1860). The philosopher Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854) asked the American continent, liberated from the Spanish yoke by his former student Simón Bolívar, “to invent, to be original, to stop copying old Europe”, and proposed the “toparchy” as a political model, a communal government for each territory of the Republic.

Under amnesty in 1994, the Bolivarian soldier chose the electoral road and embarked on a national tour. Everywhere, the crowds listened to him with particular attention. His great popularity irritated the PCV leadership. Years later, Chávez would tell Ignacio Ramonet: “The secretary general of the Communist Party said, when I came out of prison, ‘The presence of “Caudillo Chávez” damages the people’s movement. He objected to me joining the marches and demonstrations… -didn’t understand a thing. All they had, regrettably, was electoral opportunism.” (2). In 1999, the people, who had always been excluded, finally enter politics by electing Chávez as President of the Republic. Although the PCV does not digest that the “alienated people” have preferred a son of rural teachers, it rides the Bolivarian carrier and sticks Chávez’s picture on its posters to inflate its number of votes. It demands ministries, embassies. With the secret hope that the Bolivarian Revolution is no more than a parenthesis and that it returns to being the only party of the Left.

But the egalitarian vital breath of the Chavistas roots itself deeply into the political scenario and maintains the support of the electorate. In 2020, the secretary general of the PCV, Óscar Figuera, suddenly decrees that “socialism of the 21st century is not a scientific doctrine” and that “Nicolás Maduro is not a Chavista but a neoliberal”. The rank and file of the party criticize this turn and express their concern for the hemorrhage of militants (3). Figuera turns a deaf ear and, in order to perpetuate himself at the head of the party, calls a congress limited to 80 “faithful” instead of the usual 400 delegates. In 2023, a group of militants decided to take the matter to court. The Supreme Court finally rules in their favor. A transitional leadership is appointed, under the presidency of militant Henry Parra, to organize a congress that complies with the legal statutes. Figuera immediately denounces them as “Mercenaries of Maduro, the dictator”, in the statements destined for the international listing of the fraternal parties, before initiating the purge of the ‘traitors’: “after a long investigation, the plenary of our Central Committee has discovered that the historical heads of our department of International Relations – deputy Carolus Wimmer and Úrsula Aguilera – were in fact traitors at the service of the Maduro regime” (4).

From rebirth to the electoral victory of the new PCV

Photo: April 2025. PCV Campaign led by the new directorate under Henry Parra. Back at the center of the Chavista coalition, the Party obtained five more seats at the National Assembly.

While there are hardly any mobilizations around the former Secretary General, the new leadership of Henry Parra renewed grassroots work. Sections and cells from all over the country quickly unite, eager to make up for lost time and to rebuild the party. Militants returned to the heart of the Chavista coalition and launched the campaign for the general elections of May 2025. This strategy convinced the electorate: the PCV made a historic leap, going from one to six deputies in the National Assembly and becoming the third party in number of votes out of the 46 parties in the race.

Parra commented on the victory: “The stronger the Communist Party is, the stronger the Bolivarian Revolution will be. We keep our identities: PSUV [majority party of Chavismo, TN] bets more on the commune as a revolutionary engine while we bet on the working class. Many communist parties of Latin America have understood the manipulation of Figuera and have seen how he aligns himself with the ultra-right. We are going to organize the party congress and renew our ties with fraternal parties around the world. “Why support Maduro? His anti-imperialism. His socialist program. His proletarian origin. His capacity to guarantee peace, because even though we respect our political adversaries, we know that if the extreme right were to return to power, they would try to eliminate us, as they did in the coup against Chávez in 2002”.

Long before the electoral victory achieved by the new PCV leadership, and without falling into the trap of Figuera’s campaigns, communist parties from all over the world maintained their solidarity with the revolutionary government of Nicolás Maduro. Among them, the Communist Parties of Cuba, China, Vietnam, Nepal, South Africa, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil (PCdoB), South Korea (PDP), Philippines, Spain, Portugal, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (USA) and about 80 communist organizations grouped in the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (5). Not to mention the social movements and Marxist-inspired research centers, such as the Landless Movement of Brazil, the Tricontinental Institute led by the Indian historian Vijay Prashad, the International Peoples’ Assembly, the Peoples’ Forum (USA), etc…

Photos: On June 2025, Nicolas Maduro welcomes Wu Hansheng, Society Work Department of the Communist Party of China. The fifth visit of the Bolivarian President to China (2023) allowed him to sign an « all weather » strategic association with President Xi Jinping and to reinforce cooperation between the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the Communist Party of China with the purpose of eradicating poverty. On April 2025, Maduro met with Vietnam’s Communist Youth, again to reinforce cooperation. In Moscow, on May 2025, on the 80th anniversary of the victory against Nazism, he met Cuban President Diaz-Canel: The PSUV and the Communist Party of Cuba have been cooperating for a long time, at the highest level. Likewise, Maduro met with his counterparts Vladimir Putin and Captain Traore, President of Burkina Faso, with whom he signed several cooperation agreements.

Demonising Nicolás Maduro: Fallacies and Consequences

Figuera in his labyrinth
After supporting the right-wing candidate Enrique Marquez in the presidential elections of 2024 and then refusing to recognize the victory of the “dictator” Maduro, the former secretary general of the PCV has refused, like the extreme right, to participate in the legislative elections of April 2025 or in the municipal elections of July 2025: “In this context of absence of guarantees and political repression, we will not participate in the elections, which are nothing but a farce”. (6) Fear of being punished by the voters? As for the international anti-fascist meetings that for two years have been taking place in Caracas, with hundreds of parties and social movements from all over the world, in his opinion, are nothing more than “the desire of the regime to hide its authoritarian and anti-democratic character”. (7)

The ritual is unchangeable. Seated before a camera, surrounded by his entourage, Figuera reads the umpteenth statement against the “neo-liberal dictatorship of Maduro”. One is reminded of Roque Dalton’s poem about a Central Committee too busy writing its statement on “the present situation and our tasks” to see that the people in the streets are making the revolution. One is also reminded of the Mexican communists who decreed that Sandino was a “liberal caudillo” or an “adventurer,” or the Bolivian communists who refused to support Che’s guerrillas. The same quiet arrogance of those who proclaim themselves the sole possessors of the direct line to Marx, the same grandiloquent rhetoric of the 1950s, repeated out of all context. A scene so caricatured that one wonders “how dare they still” (8).

Photos: Oscar Figuera, the «Communist», in action. Backing right-wing candidate Enrique Márquez for the 2024 presidential election. Protesting against the ineligibility of the extreme right-wing coup leader María Corina Machado – an oligarch, candidate of Likud and Washington, who wrote to Netanyahu asking him to intervene militarily against Maduro. Denouncing the « dictatorial practices » of Maduro together with the director of Provea, a NGO that was originally apolitical and focused on human rights but now openly opposes the Revolution. Or denouncing Maduro’s « dictatorship » live on EVTV, the Miami-based television network of Venezuela’s extreme right.

Although he professes a routine anti-imperialism (verbal criticism of the blockade against Cuba), Figuera uses the same technique as the media against the Bolivarian revolution: Erase the causes and replace them with the effects. In his opinion, the “crisis” is caused by “Maduro’s neoliberalism, which is crushing workers’ wages”. Gone is the financial blockade that prevents the Bolivarian Government from buying medicines, which has caused the death of 100,000 patients. Gone are the more than 1,000 sanctions imposed by the United States (9), which have caused Venezuela to lose 95% of its income and have generated a massive exodus (which the media attribute to the “failure of socialism”): “Low salaries, cuts in public spending and privatization attempts framed in an anti-blockade legislation are the main causes of this exodus”.

For a second, let’s forget the broken record. Why would President Maduro suddenly decide to become “neoliberal” and “crush wages”? Out of a desire to betray the Bolivarian revolution that had raised workers’ wages to the highest level in the continent? Out of a desire to make himself unpopular? The reality is that, in the face of the Western blockade, Maduro is one of the few heads of State who has not yielded to the siren calls for austerity. When he started periodically increasing salaries by 25 or 50 percent, the private sector cancelled these increases by raising its prices in the same proportion. Faced with the inflationary spiral, Maduro decided to reactivate the national productive apparatus thanks to multipolar alliances. Not only to move away from oil rentierism, but also to replenish the State’s coffers, in particular by taxing the richest. The Central Bank has thus recovered valuable resources to intervene in the foreign exchange market and defend the currency. All this has made it possible to rebuild public services and gradually increase workers’ bonuses, while limiting the inflation that was killing them. A Chinese-style strategy: maintaining and strengthening the State as a strategic player in the economy. (10)

Results: the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reports that Venezuela has experienced the highest growth (4%) in South America for the past four years. For the first time in its 150-year oil history, the country is approaching food sovereignty, producing almost 100% of the food it consumes. In the first quarter of 2025, GDP grew by 9.32% and the country increased its non-oil exports by more than 87%. (11)

In February 2025, when Donald Trump revoked Chevron’s license to further strangle the Venezuelan economy, Maduro responded by expanding the market to Asia and delivering home number 5 million 258 thousand to a working family. On May 1, 2025, he increased the “bonus against the economic war” from $90 to $120 for 20 million families. Together with the food subsidy of 40 dollars, it amounts to 160 dollars paid each month as a supplement to the basic salary. In the private sector – the majority – the minimum wage is around $200. An important point when analyzing purchasing power in Venezuela: despite Western sanctions, and unlike neoliberal regimes, public services and basic necessities are very cheap in Venezuela. Subsidized gasoline, the cheapest in the world ($0.5 per liter), water, gas, electricity, Internet, subway, etc., are available at low cost. The food that the government supplies monthly to the population in response to the blockade costs only 5% of the price of food. Many health centers, as well as public education and culture, operate free of charge (12).

While in the West more and more families cannot make it to the end of the month, Venezuelan workers flock to the stores and “enterprises” that open every day. Caracas is invaded by commercial music and queues form early in the morning around the gigantic shopping malls (13). Thousands of Venezuelan migrants have fled the impoverishment they suffer in the “host countries” and have returned to their country thanks to the free public airline, long before the deportations and human rights violations committed by the Trump regime (14). But the former head of the PCV has issued his verdict: “The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela considers that after the announcements made on May 1, the salaries and pensions of Venezuelans have been reduced to zero.” (15)

Surfing the image built by capitalist media
When legal mafias linked to public or private companies violate human rights, the former PCV leader automatically blames Maduro. “Maduro is sowing terror among the popular classes in the same way fascism does”. This is Figuera’s ad hominem obsession, surfing on the image settled during the last twenty years by the capitalist media. While it is true that there were workers in Venezuela who have been unjustly imprisoned, sparking legitimate struggles by social movements to obtain their release, these human rights violations do not embody a government policy.

It is not in Maduro’s Venezuela but in Ignacio Lula da Silva’s Brazil where “violence in the countryside reached a record level in 2024, and the regions where agribusiness grows concentrate the cases of assassinations”. It is not in Maduro’s Venezuela but in Gustavo Petro’s Colombia where “in 2024 a social leader was assassinated every other day – be it a human rights activist, trade unionist, Afro-descendant activist, peasant leader, etc.” and that “in 2025, 70 social leaders were assassinated”. It is not in Maduro’s Venezuela but in Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico where “in 2024 125,000 people were reported as disappeared” and where clandestine mass graves are periodically discovered. Does this mean that Lula, Petro or Sheinbaum have as their policy to promote these human rights violations? (16)

In Venezuela, Maduro has publicly denounced, on several occasions, police forces bribed by large landowners to evict peasants and has put an end to the assassinations of leaders committed to agrarian reform, which was common during the Chavez era (17). Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, has dismissed hundreds of corrupt judges and trigger-happy police officers. For the Chilean communist mayor Daniel Jadue, victim of Lawfare and imprisoned in his country for creating a network of popular pharmacies: “the Bolivarian process has been able to arrest and condemn hundreds of agents of the security forces for human rights violations, for disobeying orders and using firearms during the extreme right wing violence, while in Chile not a single agent of the security forces that repressed the social movement has been arrested or tried” (18).

Let’s talk about democracy. Maduro does not limit himself to simple reforms like those of his progressive neighbors. On May 25, 2025, following the broad victory of the Chavista coalition in the legislative elections, he resumed the strategic plan to build a new State based on popular self-governments. Citizen assemblies are being held throughout the country to collect proposals for this constitutional reform. The objective, explains the Bolivarian President, is “to build a modern democracy based on the direct participation of citizens, the power of social movements and the community. A great process of broad democratization of Venezuelan society, of political, institutional, economic, social, cultural and educational life. Because a system that chooses who has more money to control TikTok, Instagram, radio and television is not a democracy, but a farce, a theater of the absurd. Venezuela does not want it, because its entire history is impregnated with the idea and the desire for genuine democracy.” (19)

When Figuera denounces that the “dictator Maduro sows terror like fascism”, should we see in his speech the hand of USAID or NED (20)? Certainly, he gravitates in the ecosystem of “human rights” NGOs which, like PROVEA, have drifted towards open political opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution and its constituent assemblies. NGOs that fabricate dossiers of “political prisoners” for the media and for the “asylums” run by Venezuelan ultra-right-wing mafias in the U.S. So much so that even the Trump administration has distanced itself from this business (21). But there is an even more mediocre explanation. Before the July 2024 presidential elections, the ultra-right Machado announced that, if she won, she would “charge” the Chavistas. In other words, she would eliminate them. Did the former leader of the PCV sign a non-aggression electoral pact with her in the hope that, defeated at the polls, Chavismo would disappear? And that the PCV would once again become the only left-wing party? It is not such a far-fetched hypothesis, considering Figuera’s sectarianism and opportunism.

The struggle between the old and the new

Photos: Henry Parra, the new president of the PCV – campaigning in the streets with some comrades for the April 2025 legislative elections. Venezuela’s Communist Youth, and their leader, Manuel Aleman, explain their desire to work with the popular self-governments : « How are we nota going to support municipalities where people organize and vote according to their own interests ? »

If, for twenty years, the media empires have been labeling Venezuela as a “dictatorship”, it is because they need to prevent the Bolivarian revolution’s democratization machine from spreading. For journalist Maurice Lemoine, “at the risk of surprising Venezuela’s critics, its thousands of popular self-governments are the most ambitious experiment in participatory democracy on the continent, and probably far beyond”. The media tolerate local experiments (Zapatismo, Rojava, etc…) but must conceal this “revolution within the revolution” which threatens the system and impresses many intellectuals and movements of the Global South. For the Director of the Tricontinental Institute, Indian historian Vijay Prashad, “in Venezuela, the communes forged in the popular neighborhoods play a central role in the constitution of new ideas and material forces that move society forward”. For Puerto Rican decolonial sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, “perhaps with all the difficulties the Empire has created in Venezuela, we are losing sight of the historical moment and what is being built in the communes which does not exist anywhere else in Latin America.

For Messilene Gorete, international coordinator of the Landless Movement of Brazil: “Sometimes, on the left, we have very closed ideas about the level of preparation and planning needed to move forward, and this can become an obstacle. Creativity – in a country where people are very spontaneous – is a great virtue of the Bolivarian revolution. Here, the people are truly the subject of the revolution. And the Venezuelan commune is a model that our continent needs.” Feminist activist Marta Martín Morán, responsible for Latin America for the Communist Party of Spain, who has observed a dozen electoral processes in Venezuela, does not hide her enthusiasm for the quarterly consultations through which the population of each commune chooses the project to be financed by the state. Mexican feminist sociologist Karina Ochoa highlights the central role of women, “eager to replace power-over with power-for” (22).

Source : https://venezuelainfos.wordpress.com/2025/06/17/au-venezuela-renaissance-et-victoire-du-parti-communiste/

Notes :