Featured Photo: Capriles sobre verjas. From: Julio César Mesa
By: Emma Scully and Daniel A. Tovar, Research Associates at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
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Henrique Capriles Radonski, opposition politician and governor of Venezuela's Miranda state, disclosed a pressing reality of Venezuelan politics in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País on June 13. When asked if the Venezuelan opposition is unified, Capriles, two-time presidential candidate who came close to defeating Nicolás Maduro in the 2013 elections, expressed confidence that the opposition is "going to be unified," thus confirming the existence of intra-opposition divisions that have gradually chipped away at the fabric of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable; MUD), the electoral coalition of Venezuelan opposition parties.[1] The purpose of this article is to trace and outline the sources of the divisions within MUD that have transformed it into a splintered opposition coalition plagued by party factionalism. Failure to resurface as a cohesive coalition may help the current government to retain a majority in the national assembly in this year's parliamentary elections on December 6. |
