A reader asked in the context of the Venezuela unrest, “Do you really think that every regime that you don’t like is necessarily illegitimate?” Another reader replies:
Egypt is probably the best example here. Mubarak was pro-Western but was very clearly illegitimate and undemocratic. Morsi was popularly elected and certainly had more legitimacy than Mubarak, but also had his authoritarian streak. We can rightly condemn Mubarak’s regime for its lack of legitimacy and then turn around and criticize Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood for attempting to consolidate power and its increasing authoritarianism. And we can now be wary that the army that replaced Morsi may not guide the country back to democracy.
Venezuela, where I lived for 9 years in the ’80s and early ’90s, is a similar story. The country has had a reasonably democratic, albeit very corrupt, government for many years. It could rightfully be criticized for enriching the elite and ignoring the country’s poor and sowing the seeds for its own electoral overthrow by Hugo Chavez. On the other hand, Chavez, whether you agree with his policies or not, became increasingly un-democratic.
Despite the fact that he used the trappings of democracy, via elections and referenda, he nonetheless became increasingly intolerant of dissent, manipulative of elections, and generally undemocratic, not to mention his economic repression of opponents. This appears to have followed through to the government of Nicholas Maduro. If the opposition does manage to bring down Maduro, there is no way of knowing how things will end up. It could be that a chastened opposition decides that it will govern both effectively and legitimately; it is also possible that Maduro could be replaced with a right-wing dictator, whose policies might be more pro-western but who may be more illegitimate than Chavez or Maduro.
Because there is a gradient in legitimacy from “mostly democratic” to “elected dictatorships,” it is hard to draw a line, especially when an inherently un-democractic means is used to bring about a change in regime. Moreover, as with Egypt, there is no guarantee that the outcome of a popular overthrow of an authoritarian leader won’t lead to his replacement by another authoritarian leader. I didn’t support Chavez in the least, but I thought the military coup against him in 2002 was ill-advised.
But at this point things in Venezuela may have reached a breaking point. It is always my hope that the two sides will seek compromise and that transition from authoritarianism to democracy is (mostly) smooth (and it does happen; for example Augusto Pinochet, perhaps one of the most authoritarian and illegitimate leaders in the Western Hemisphere, nonetheless voluntarily gave up his power and abided by the results of a free and fair referendum on his rule. It is perhaps not surprising that Chile has been a stable Democracy since). I would love nothing more than for Maduro to release political prisoners, loosen restrictions on the press, decentralize power, etc., and for future elections to be completely free and fair. I’m not optimistic.
Richard Obuchi makes related points:
Polity IV is a project of the Center for Systemic Peace, which codifies characteristics of political regimes in order to classify them –in opposite extremes- as “Institutionalized Democracies” or “Autocratic Regimes”. To formulate the indicator, Polity IV considers the election mechanism for the Executive Power (meaning regulations, competition and open participation); institutional constraints on the exercise of power by the Executive Power; and the degree of regulation and political competition.
Even though President Maduro claims that the 19 elections held in Venezuela between 1999 and 2013 confirm Venezuela’s democratic nature, in truth the country’s political system tends toward an autocratic regime.
Rodrigo Linares blames the Venezuelan crisis on institutional decay. He argues that the “rock-bottom-basic institutions a modern country needs – the high school civics triad of the Executive, the Legislature, and the courts – have just plain stopped operating in anything like a recognizable form”:
[I]n theory, there’s supposed to be a National Assembly and an independent Supreme Court in place able to keep an overzealous President in check. That is where Venezuelan institutions, and its politicians, have failed the country. First, in 2004, the Supreme Court was packed with a gaggle of unconditional yes-men (and women), ending any hope for judicial redress. Then our parliament went into a protracted death spiral.
A simplified mission of the Parliament is, of course, to pass legislation, but it is a lot more than that. It is place for different political forces to meet and talk (parler in french). In this space, political forces look for common ground to reach solutions that satisfy all representatives, and through the representatives, the constituents. The Parliament is an outlet for discontent, a space for negotiation where progress is slow but effective.
We talk and argue in Parliament so that we don’t have to do it out in the streets. But we broke Parliament, and turned it into a boxing ring, and we allowed our courts to be packed, breaking the one final check to authoritarian control.
Meanwhile, a reader provides “a personal view of the man Maduro calls a fascist and The Nation considers elitist”:
Leo Lopez and I were roommates in our firstyear at the Kennedy School in 1994. It’s bizarre to seem him branded a right-winger, since his economic views
tended to be closer to what The Nation usually supports, which is to say they tended to be a little on the left side of the norm even at Harvard. Those not being my politics, we had some good debates. What I remember clearly is that what he cared about most, and talked about most, was how to improve the lives of Venezuelan people. Never once did he bemoan how the elites in his country needed to take back power. Quite the opposite.
“The very picture of privilege”? Just before school started, when I went to buy furniture for my room, Leo went trolling the streets of Cambridge for discarded junk with which to outfit his bedroom. The desk he made out of an abandoned door was particularly impressive.
Leo stood out in other ways. He was serious in a way that the rest of us weren’t, surely because while all of us cared about public policy (he and I were both in the Masters in Public Policy program) politics in Venezuela mattered to him in a far more profound way than our American debates about whether Tom Foley or Newt Gingrich should be speaker of the house.
Leo’s no elitist. He’s an idealist. He’s not a fascist, he’s a democrat.
Beyond all that, he was also a hell of a nice guy. It’s hard to be that focused on serious matters and still retain a cheerful disposition, but Leo managed it. While we never became close friends, it was pretty much impossible not to like him. Venezuela’s lucky to have him, and I’m sure you’ll join me in praying he stays safe.
(Photo from Getty)
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