[MIAMIHERALD] As Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seeks another six-year term on Sunday, it’s clear that he ‐ like the rest of the country ‐ is running on empty.Oil-rich and wealthy just a few years ago, Venezuela today is being gutted by hyperinflation, food shortages, collapsing infrastructure, international sanctions, growing protests and an exodus of the desperate.
Maduro, 55, is expected to win Sunday’s vote, which is being decried as fraudulent by the international community, amid opposition calls for a boycott.
And analysts expect that will mean more pain, trouble and repression for the struggling South American country.
"Nations don’t reach bottom. There is always further to fall," Phil Gunson, an analyst with the Crisis Group, said at a conference at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center in Washington, D.C., Thursday. "But it does seem like life as we know it in Venezuela will be impossible unless there is a radical change."
And yet it’s hard to imagine how that change might come.
On the campaign trail, Maduro has vowed to use his next term to pull out of the economic death spiral that many people blame him for starting in the first place.
| "I am going to lead great economic changes, and I am going to create an economic revolution that will shake the world," he said at his closing campaign Thursday. "Whatever it costs, however long it takes, I will do it." |
But during his campaign, he's been doubling down on the same failing policies, taking over the country’s largest private bank, Banesco, forcing companies to slash prices and expropriating others.
It's hard to imagine Maduro, a former transportation worker, changing his economic playbook after the election, Gunson said.
"Maduro, the bus driver, is going to drive the bus over a cliff," he said.