Early on Monday morning, the head of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council Elvis Amoroso sparked an international backlash by declaring President Nicolás Maduro as the winner of Sunday’s election.
The council claimed that the government had received 51 percent of the vote, while Edmundo González Urrutia of the opposition alliance had polled 44 percent. The opposition rejects this interpretation of events, releasing a statement saying that González won as much as 70 percent.
Venezuela now faces a period of turmoil as the Maduro administration seeks to cement its hold on power and the opposition lobbies the international community for support.
Vice President Kamala Harris issued a considered response to the result, posting on social media that “the will of the Venezuelan people must be respected” while committing the United States “to work toward a more democratic, prosperous, and secure future for the people of Venezuela.”
The vice president’s comments are an indication that the Biden administration — and a potential successor administration of her own — will continue to work with Maduro despite concerns about electoral impropriety.
Foreign policy hawks in the Republican Party have unsurprisingly taken a different line. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a Donald Trump ally, attacked the Democrats over the result, saying that President Biden and Harris had been “suckered” into initially agreeing to wind down economic sanctions on Venezuela in return for an election.
If reelected in November, Trump seems likely to return to the “maximum pressure” approach to Venezuela of 2017-2020. The South American nation was frozen out of the international economy, its prodigious energy sector placed under strict sanctions.
A humanitarian crisis promptly ensued, crushing living standards and causing millions to flee across the continent and to the southern border of the U.S. These flows continue with the Council on Foreign Relations reporting that Venezuelans account for 64 percent of all migrants who have crossed Panama’s Darién Gap so far in 2024.
Despite the clash over sanctions policy, Democratic and Republican pledges to strengthen the border makes the stability of Venezuela a bipartisan issue. Even the most hawkish Republican lawmakers grasp that a period of turmoil following Monday’s contested result will prompt Venezuelans to leave the country in their hundreds of thousands.
The Democrats have also shown an interest in the wellbeing of Venezuelans within the country itself. An agreement reached in October last year to unwind sanctions in return for democratic reforms had a positive impact on living standards, even though the deal expired in April after the Biden administration judged that Maduro had not gone far enough.
Biden and Harris clearly see U.S.-Venezuela relations as a two-way street under which Venezuela institutes reforms to regain access to international markets for its oil and gas, while U.S. consumers benefit in turn from cheaper prices at the pump.
In this context, the Biden administration’s next steps are likely to be three-fold. Firstly, it will push the Maduro government to release evidence from all of Venezuela’s polling stations to prove right the declaration of the National Electoral Council.
Second, Venezuela’s opposition bloc is likely to be forewarned against stoking domestic unrest – even if there is great sympathy for their plight.
Lastly, the State Department and the U.S.’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) will now be besieged by communications from energy firms operating in Venezuela who do not want the contested result to undermine their business. These firms will argue that the U.S.’s interests are best served by retaining access to Venezuelan hydrocarbons regardless of the result.
In turn, Maduro pledged Sunday night that he will soon provide “irrefutable proof” that his alleged election victory was not fraudulent. Meanwhile, the international community, above all else, must work to guarantee that political division does not descend into violence and mass unrest on the streets of Venezuela.
Jose Chalhoub is a political risk analyst at Orinoco Research, based in Caracas, Venezuela.