"Politics is the art of the possible" - not the impossible

 

First German chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously opined, "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best."  That's as true today as it was when he said it, about one-and-a-half centuries ago.  Unfortunately, many politicians ignore it and try to carry on regardless, usually with disastrous or tragic consequences.

The latest to do so is Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has said she should "absolutely" be in charge of the country, following the US ousting of President Nicolás Maduro last week.

"We are ready and willing to serve our people as we have been mandated," Machado said in an interview with the BBC's US partner CBS.

She thanked US President Donald Trump for his "leadership and courage" after US forces stormed Caracas and arrested Maduro, but said nobody trusted the deposed president's ally who has been appointed as interim leader.

Machado and her opposition movement claimed victory in 2024's heavily disputed elections, but Trump has refused to back her, saying she lacks popular support.

There's more at the link.

I accept that Ms. Machado won an electoral majority in Venezuela during the most recent elections, but she never took power, because Maduro and his goons controlled almost every avenue of control open to them.  She was blocked at every turn, and had to go into hiding in case he arrested her - in which case she'd surely have had an accident or illness while incarcerated that would have killed her.  She recently had to be smuggled out of the country to accept her Nobel Peace Prize.

There's simply no way she can muster enough support from the authority structures in Venezuela to hope to take over.  Maduro and Chavez loyalists would kill her before she took office, and the entire government bureaucracy and machinery of state - long since converted into bribe-taking, corrupt, self-seeking figureheads - would refuse to obey any directive she issued, or any law she had passed, that threatens their place in the sun.  She may have popular support among the electorate, but the reality of the Venezuelan equivalent of the "Deep State" is that electoral support doesn't matter at this time.  As we noted yesterday:

Trump “is correct in saying this is a deeply corrupt regime, and it’s a deeply factionalised military and state structure engaged in all sorts of illicit activities, who would be hard pressed to part with their ill-gotten gains, prestige and positions, and literally put their necks on the line,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House.

. . .

And Maduro and Hugo Chávez, his predecessor, bought loyalty by carving the state into fiefdoms from which their various clients could extract rents, impoverishing the nation while creating powerful rival power centres.

“Now the head is gone, as we see when you have dictators die, you end up getting a lot of rivals under the leader jostling for power. So don’t be surprised if somebody in the military shoots the vice-president. That’s part of the disintegration,” says Pape.

Again, more at the link.

I agree that, in simple justice, Ms. Machado probably should be the next President of Venezuela.  However, in cold, hard, practical terms, for her to assume that office would be a death sentence for her, her family, and many Venezuelans who support her.  It would plunge that country into even greater turmoil.  It's simply impossible under present conditions.  To think otherwise is to live in cloud cuckoo land.

Peter