Socialist thug Nicolas Maduro ‘wins’ Venezuelan ‘elections’ while people flee and starve

You realize it’s not a real election when political opposition is put in jail, and when the only party that has any sort of legal status controls everything from the polling to the counting. And you realize that when a nation is collapsing and people are starving, the only way the incumbent “wins” is if any other outcome has been made impossible by the corruption of civic institutions.

That’s why no one is surprised that Nicolas Maduro “won” in yesterday’s “elections” in Venezuela, and why no one is stupid enough to think it means anything:

Venezuela’s leftist President Nicholas Maduro has easily won a second term, but his main rivals have refused to accept the results, calling the polling fraudulent — a view shared by the United States and many independent observers. Venezuela’s National Election Council, run by Maduro loyalists, said that with nearly 93 percent of polling stations reporting by Sunday, Maduro had won almost 68 percent of the vote, beating his nearest challenger, Henri Falcon, by almost 40 points. “They underestimated me,” said a triumphant Maduro to cheers from his supporters as fireworks sounded and confetti fell at the presidential palace in Caracas. Maduro, 55, replaced Hugo Chavez when the longtime Venezuelan socialist died of cancer in 2013. Since then, Maduro has presided over a collapsing economy, hyperinflation, widespread hunger and a mass of refugees trying to escape the desperate conditions. The country has been further hit by falling oil exports and U.S. imposed sanctions. Fewer than half of registered voters turned up at the polls, but the opposition, which has boycotted the election, said even that figure was inflated.

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Those opposed to Maduro have long maintained that the election is fraudulent, not least because the opposition’s most popular leaders — the ones with the best chance of unseating the president — were barred from running. As NPR’s Philip Reeves reports from Caracas, “Throughout the day voting stations appeared almost empty around the capital.” Despite that, election officials claim turnout of nearly 50 percent.

You have to love Maduro’s boast that people “underestimated” him. Hardly. Everyone knew the announced outcome would be something like this, and everyone knew he would be very effective at jailing his real opposition and manipulating the polling data to give him exactly the result he wanted. Who underestimated that? It was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. Here’s another area where we don’t underestimate Maduro: He has destroyed Venezuela. No small feat. He’s taken one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world and decimated its economy through corruption, mismanagement and graft. He’s taken a country that could be a major player in global energy markets and put it in a position to have to beg Russia for credit extensions just to pay the interest on its existing debt. He’s causing his people to starve because government control of production and distribution has caused shortages so severe, we’ve seen people hijacking trucks filled with live chickens so they can get food.

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It’s worth keeping in mind that Maduro was no great revolutionary. His patron Hugo Chavez, for all his faults, was the one who led the socialist revolution and brought the skills and charisma necessary to fool the people and pull it off. Maduro was a mere hanger-on, who lucked into the top job when Chavez died young and left no capable successor. Socialism was always going to fail in Venezuela, but this stupid fool has combined the inherent flaws of the system with a combination of corruption and thuggish tyranny that has inflicted his people with neither prosperity nor peace, nor freedom. I am not going to get into the business of predicting what will happen next in Venezuela, or exactly how long Maduro’s regime can last. But I will say this: Maduro’s “victory” in this “election” is irrelevant to eventual fate. The public doesn’t accept the election as legitimate, and even the international community isn’t pretending it’s anything but a massive fraud. You’d have to be old enough to remember, but Ferdinand Marcos fell from power in the Philippines shortly after an “election victory” much like this one. If anything, the nerve of the fraud was so great, it hastened his demise because the people were that much more appalled at what he’d tried to do to them. Maduro can’t seem to do anything right accept go through the motions of sham elections. He’s pretty pleased with himself at the moment for holding onto power, but that won’t do him any good if the people decide the only way to get rid of him is to follow the example set for them in Romania in 1989. It would sure as hell be justice, though.