This article was originally posted by The New Republic
Sunday’s parliamentary election in Venezuela saw Chávez’s governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela slump to a landslide. Chavistas walked off with 59 percent of the seats in Venezuela’s single-chamber National Assembly on the back of just 48 percent of the vote, all thanks to a well-known list of unfair voting conditions that left the playing field far from level: an aggressively gerrymandered map, massive rural overrepresentation, and blatantly biased election rules approved by a blatantly biased Elections Commission.
Though routed in the seat count, the vote felt like a win—and a coming of age—for opposition activists. Gone are the days when the words “Venezuelan opposition” conjured a hodge-podge of ancien regime holdovers and reactionary cranks. The vote was a milestone in the opposition’s gradual transformation into an organized mass political movement able to credibly challenge Chávez for the allegiance of everyday Venezuelans.
Working in tremendously challenging circumstances against a hyper-empowered petrostate that had put all its resources into the campaign, the opposition’s umbrella Roundtable for Democratic Unity (the unfortunately anagramed M.U.D.) went toe-to-toe with chavismo, coming within 90,000 votes (out of eleven million cast) of matching their tally. (A small anti-Chavez left-wing party got the remaining 3 percent.)