The vote was free but not fair — that’s the cliche. It’s an evasion. Venezuela’s election wasn’t rigged. Nobody disputes that the country wanted Chavez. Nobody questions his winning by 55 percent to 44 percent. Venezuela is indeed democracy at work — at work, yet gone tragically wrong.
Of course, Chavez used the power of the state to buy votes and put the opposition at a disadvantage. Yes, he exploited those advantages to an unusual degree, and could do it because he’d already ground down many of the country’s constitutional protections. But this line of argument is awkwardly far- reaching. If governments in “real democracies” don’t buy votes with public money or exploit the other electoral advantages of incumbency, then the number of such states shrinks to the point of meaninglessness.
Look at the money spent on the U.S. presidential campaigns, for instance. A month from now, ask the losing side whether that vote was “fair” as well as free.
It’s better to admit that Venezuela is a democracy — that Chavez stands re-elected by the will of the people — but that democracy is not enough. This isn’t just semantics. Chavez makes it easier to see how democracies can be corrupted, how important it is to arrest that decay early on, and that illiberal democracies like Venezuela are not necessarily anomalies or exceptions.
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