Photo: Acting President Ramón J. Velásquez (1993–1994) and his cabinet on the last day of his term. Dr. Velásquez, both during his brief tenure and previously at the helm of a special commission, was a leading proponent of decentralization in the late 20th-century. | Source: Archivo Fotografía Urbana.
The next democratically elected president of Venezuela will inherit an office that is simultaneously too powerful and not powerful enough.
Too powerful because decades of centralization have placed extraordinary political, fiscal and administrative authority in Miraflores. Not powerful enough because whoever inherits it will also confront a damaged bureaucracy, weak public services, deteriorated infrastructure and institutions that may still be controlled by political adversaries.
That combination will make concentration tempting.
A new government will have an enormous reconstruction mandate and voters impatient for results. Every institutional restraint will risk looking like another obstacle left behind by chavismo. Decentralization can wait until the State is stabilized. Congressional procedures can wait because the crisis is urgent. Extraordinary executive authorities can be justified because ordinary government is too slow.
Many of those arguments will contain some truth.
That is what makes them dangerous.
Chávez inherited Venezuela’s presidentialist political culture and radicalized it.
If Venezuela wants this transition to be the last one it needs, the country cannot simply transfer the powers accumulated in the presidency to someone more democratic. But neither can it respond to authoritarianism by constructing an executive incapable of governing.
The question is not whether Venezuela needs a strong president or a weak one. It needs to decide what the president should actually be strong enough to do.
Miraflores was powerful before Chávez
Chavismo radically expanded executive power, but it did not invent Venezuelan presidentialism.
Long before Hugo Chávez, the presidency occupied an unusually commanding position over the political system. Oil reinforced that arrangement. Whoever controlled the national government controlled the principal source of public revenue, and the ability to distribute that revenue made Caracas not merely the political center of Venezuela but the financial center on which much of the rest of the government depended.
The result was a particular understanding of political effectiveness. Presidents were expected to not merely administer the executive branch but to solve national problems, distribute resources, arbitrate conflicts and impose direction on the State.
Chávez inherited that culture and radicalized it.
Carlos Rangel would have recognized something familiar in the phenomenon. His critique of Latin American political culture repeatedly returned to the attraction of the providential leader: the politician whose extraordinary personal mandate supposedly allows him to rise above institutions that appear slow, compromised or incapable of producing the transformation the country requires.
A new democracy has to be built for the political society Venezuela actually has.
Chavismo gave that tradition a twenty-first-century vocabulary. The leader possessed a direct relationship with the people. Institutions that resisted him therefore did not represent legitimate constraints on democratic power; they interfered with the popular mandate.
That logic did not begin with Chávez, and removing chavismo will not automatically remove it.
This is one reason institutional design matters more than hoping Venezuela will simply develop a different political culture. A new democracy has to be built for the political society Venezuela actually has, including its recurring attraction to presidents who promise to cut through institutions rather than patiently govern through them.
Decentralization was one answer
Venezuela has attempted to solve part of this problem before.
The decentralization reforms beginning in 1989 transformed Venezuelan politics by allowing voters to directly elect governors and mayors. They created alternative centers of democratic legitimacy, allowed regional leaders to build careers outside national party hierarchies and weakened the assumption that every important political decision had to originate in Caracas.
Those reforms were real democratic progress.
They also occurred during the accelerating crisis of the political system that had governed Venezuela since 1958. Carlos Andrés Pérez was attempting a profound economic transformation while confronting social unrest, two coup attempts, resistance within his own party and an increasingly fragmented political environment.
Enough independently powerful actors with absolute vetoes can also make coherent government extraordinarily difficult.
It would be wrong to claim that decentralization caused Pérez’s downfall. The crisis of his second government had far deeper causes. But the period should caution against the assumption that dispersing power automatically produces better government. A political system needs restraints. It also needs the capacity to reach decisions.
Juan Linz famously warned that presidential systems contain an inherent problem of competing legitimacy: both the president and the legislature can claim a direct mandate from voters. Venezuela could face that problem almost immediately in a transition. A newly elected president may claim a national mandate for reconstruction while legislators, governors, courts and other institutions exercise equally legitimate powers to resist particular policies.
Those conflicts are not defects but rather an essential part of democracy.
But enough independently powerful actors with absolute vetoes can also make coherent government extraordinarily difficult. The goal cannot therefore be to create as many obstacles to presidential action as possible.
Decentralization has to mean power, not administration
Chavismo subsequently demonstrated another weakness in Venezuela’s earlier decentralization: elected local government does not necessarily amount to decentralized power.
A governor who depends overwhelmingly on transfers determined in Caracas may be politically elected but remains fiscally vulnerable to the center. A municipality with responsibilities but inadequate revenue possesses decentralization on paper. A regional government whose police, infrastructure projects or public services can be bypassed by parallel national authorities is autonomous only until Miraflores decides otherwise.
Chávez and his successors became adept at exploiting these weaknesses. Political authority could be recentralized, resources redirected, parallel institutions created and opposition-controlled governments bypassed without formally abolishing governors or mayors.
A president who negotiates every administrative action with multiple institutions would not protect democracy for very long. It could instead discredit it.
A serious decentralization therefore has to involve more than another constitutional declaration that Venezuela is a federal State.
It must ask where revenue is collected, who controls it, which responsibilities genuinely belong to states and municipalities and which functions require national coordination. Regional governments need enough authority and predictable resources to govern without requesting political permission from the president. But the national government must retain enough capacity to maintain common standards, respond to national emergencies, redistribute among regions and preserve the Venezuelan State as a functioning whole.
That balance is much harder than simply transferring competencies from one level of government to another.
The State must still be able to act
An executive constrained by law is not the same thing as an impotent executive. The Venezuelan president should be capable of executing a legally approved budget, directing the national administration, coordinating responses to disasters, conducting foreign policy and implementing the program on which voters elected the government. Rebuilding infrastructure, stabilizing public finances and restoring basic services will require a national government capable of making decisions and making those decisions stick.
A presidency that must negotiate every administrative action with multiple institutions would not protect democracy for very long. It could instead discredit it. Citizens judge democratic government partly by whether it governs. If elections repeatedly produce leaders incapable of responding to crime, blackouts, inflation or deteriorating public services because every decision disappears into institutional paralysis, frustration with democratic restraint will eventually become politically valuable. The politician promising to eliminate the obstacles will always be waiting.
Institutional design has to emerge from Venezuela’s own history and needs.
Machiavelli understood the underlying problem centuries before modern constitutionalism gave it different terminology: a political order that cannot preserve itself will not remain a political order for long. Democracies require enough power to respond to genuine threats.
The danger lies in what happens next.
Emergency authorities created to save the State can outlive the emergency. Executive discretion justified by reconstruction can become normal government. A president given extraordinary authority because democratic institutions are initially weak acquires the ability to ensure that those institutions remain weak.
Venezuela has already lived that cycle.
Miraflores should matter less
The difficult conclusion is that democratic reconstruction will require whoever next controls the presidency to surrender powers at precisely the moment when there will be compelling reasons to retain them. That is a much harder political proposition than replacing chavista officials.
Someone who has spent years fighting to reach Miraflores may arrive there facing a devastated country and discover an arsenal of executive authority that could make reconstruction easier. It will be extraordinarily tempting to argue that institutional reform should come later, after the emergency has passed and the country has stabilized.
But democratic restraints are easiest to support when they constrain somebody else. Their real test comes when they constrain us.
The president should not determine whether an opposition governor receives the resources necessary to govern. The executive should not be able to transform regulatory authority into political discipline. Emergency powers should expire without depending on presidential generosity. Institutions capable of investigating the government should not owe their survival to that government’s continued support.
None of this necessarily requires turning Venezuela into a parliamentary republic, copying the United States or mechanically importing someone else’s federal model. Institutional design has to emerge from Venezuela’s own history and needs.
But one principle should survive whatever arrangement eventually emerges: winning the presidency should not mean winning the State. That principle protects more than the opposition, it also protects the president.
Winning should give politicians the authority to govern without giving them the tools to decide whether anybody else will ever govern again.
A system in which the loss of Miraflores does not mean losing access to every meaningful source of political authority makes electoral defeat less existential. Governors can govern. Legislators retain influence. Parties can preserve territorial organizations. Former incumbents can imagine returning through elections rather than manipulating the State to avoid leaving. Distributing power can therefore make alternation easier to accept.
The point is not to make political victory meaningless. Elections must have consequences. Governments need enough authority to implement different programs or democracy becomes little more than a ritual for changing administrators.
The objective is narrower: winning should give politicians the authority to govern without giving them the tools to decide whether anybody else will ever govern again.
That is the distinction Venezuela failed to maintain.
And it brings three problems of institutional reconstruction together. Venezuela needs institutions that remain democratic regardless of who occupies them. It needs a State capable of implementing rules while remaining bound by them. And it needs political power distributed widely enough that no single electoral victory becomes an ownership of the Republic.
For 25 years, Venezuela’s political system increasingly revolved around a simple question: who controls Miraflores?
A durable democracy will require making the answer matter considerably less. The next president of Venezuela should inherit enough power to govern the country, but considerably less power to define it.