Henrique Capriles Radonski
AFP/Caracas
Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles says he fears President Nicolas Maduro’s crisis-hit government, fearing a humiliating loss, will cancel key legislative elections later this year.
With Venezuela’s economy in recession, its oil revenues plunging and consumers facing chronic shortages of basic goods, Maduro’s approval rating has sunk to a low of around 20% - the worst crisis yet for the political movement founded by his late mentor, leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez.
That has fed optimism among the divided opposition that it can win control of the National Assembly at elections due this year, for which a date has not yet been set.
But Capriles - who narrowly lost the 2013 presidential vote to Maduro after Chavez’s death - said the government would rather provoke the opposition into violence than face it at the polls.
“The government had never had such a large deficit (in the polls) heading into an election. Now it does. How does it change that? It rigs the game,” he said in an interview.
“Is it capable of suspending (the election)? I think they’re capable of anything,” he said.
A year after bloody street protests erupted across Venezuela, the government wants the opposition to “fall into the trap of violence,” said Capriles, the governor of the wealthy northern state of Miranda.
“They want to instil fear in people,” he said. Suspending the elections “is a bomb that the government could make explode.”
Capriles, a 42-year-old lawyer, spoke optimistically of the opposition’s chances, saying this could be the year they loosen a 16-year-long grip that “Chavistas” have on the South American oil giant.
If the opposition takes control of the National Assembly, it could call a referendum next year to remove Maduro from power.
“There’s no reason to lose. It would be stupid, it would be self-destructive,” Capriles said, sporting jeans and a baseball cap in the colours of the Venezuelan flag.
But although Venezuelans are fed up with long lines, soaring prices and shortages of products ranging from medicine to toilet paper, the opposition is weakened by its own divisions.
A short walk away from the public school where Capriles was interviewed sits the Ramo Verde prison, where two other, more hardline opposition leaders are in jail: protest leader Leopoldo Lopez and Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma.
Together with expelled lawmaker Maria Corina Machado, they founded a grassroots opposition movement aimed at ousting Maduro through street protests, called “La Salida” (which translates as both “The Solution” and “The Exit”).
The movement mobilised hundreds of thousands of protesters to take to the streets from January to May last year.
The protests exploded into violence as the government responded with counter-demonstrations and a police crackdown, leaving 43 people dead, hundreds wounded and thousands arrested.
