crossroads

Two months after January 3, the country has found itself at an unprecedented crossroads with three main political actors: the chavista regime, the government of the United States, and the Venezuelan opposition.

Chavismo now faces a historically unique situation after 27 years of political (as well as social and economic) control. It is under pressure from the US to move toward a transition, while at the same time trying to contain the tensions that exist within its own internal structures.

For its part, Washington is trying to steer a transition in Venezuela that is acceptable for both its domestic and foreign policy, leveraging the influence it gained from the capture of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores over both the regime and the opposition.

And the opposition has entered a situation of undeclared conflict. In just a few days, the opposition landscape has shifted in unimaginable ways, with the perception of inaction from María Corina Machado, the sudden emergence of Enrique Márquez during the State of the Union address, and the rest of the opposition reassessing its options.

The inevitable amid uncertainty

The path toward a transition at this moment is uncertain. The regime is seeking a balance between satisfying US demands while avoiding, as much as possible, the deterioration of its own internal political and economic arrangements. At the same time, it continues to move quickly to consolidate control over the process, and more and more details are emerging about how it is setting the guidelines for the Rodríguez siblings. For instance, the visit this week by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

The opposition universe appears to be an earthquake, above all amid the practical disappearance of María Corina Machado from public debate and, more recently, the “Márquez effect,” whose medium or long-term impact remains uncertain. Where there is consensus, however, is on the need for a new election. Marco Rubio, María Corina Machado, and now Enrique Márquez are on the same page: there must be new elections that legitimize the political transition. As for the Rodrigato, we can imagine what it thinks about that.

A new election to choose the opposition’s presidential candidate would be a way to confront several elephants in the room.

Until just a few days ago, it would have been easy to argue that the opposition’s presidential candidate should be Machado. After all, the results of July 28, 2024 were fundamentally the result of her leadership, and she would have been the presidential candidate if the Maduro regime had allowed it.

But Márquez’s appearance in Washington DC and his subsequent press conference suggested that this Zuliano “black swan” could be acting with the acquiescence of both the Rodrigato and the Trump administration. Evidence of this includes Márquez being invited to Trump’s address, as well as his comments about a figure as close to the Rodríguez siblings as José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

For that reason, it now seems that there will be an election sooner or later. It also seems that, as things stand today, we could head into that election with at least two candidates on the opposition side.

That would be a good scenario for the Rodrigato.

New primaries

In times of legitimacy crisis, the proper course is to look to the sovereign. Given everything that has happened, it seems necessary to call a new primary vote to choose an opposition candidate—whoever the Rodrigato’s candidate may be—in the presidential election that must take place given Maduro’s absolute absence.

A new election to choose the opposition’s presidential candidate would be a way to confront several elephants in the room. The first is the need to present the other two actors (the regime and the United States) with an electoral calendar that should not be unnecessarily delayed. The second is the convenience of unifying and strengthening party structures. If the process is well managed, it could encourage a reunion of the different opposition forces around a common and higher objective.

Another elephant shaking Venezuela’s narrow public space is the urgency of restarting citizen mobilization around a concrete political initiative. Finally, those primaries could once again make it possible to go into a presidential election with a single candidate, preventing the regime from promoting multiple “opposition” candidacies to divide the electorate.

The primaries that chose Henrique Capriles as the candidate for the 2012 presidential election, and the primaries that selected María Corina Machado as the candidate for the 2024 presidential election, were good precedents for successfully resolving several political problems. Considering the sovereign is a good idea, or at least most of the time.

As rickshaw puller Anwar Pagla turned into the road leading to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) office in Gulshan, Dhaka, on the afternoon after the parliamentary election, a small commotion stirred. His rickshaw had a Bangladeshi flag fixed to one side of the hood and the BNP’s flag to the other. Pagla is an ardent supporter.

“They call me mad because I consider this party everything in my life. But it doesn’t matter. We have won and Bangladesh will now be better,” he told Al Jazeera.

Nearly two decades after it last governed, the BNP returned to power after a landslide victory in Thursday’s parliamentary election.

The Election Commission published the gazette of the members of parliament elected, a final official seal on the election process, on Saturday. The centre-right BNP’s alliance secured 212 of the 300 seats. The alliance led by its main rival, the Jamaat-e-Islami – Bangladesh’s largest religion-based party – secured 77.

Those elections came a year and a half after a nationwide protest movement ousted the country’s former leadership and saw 1,400 people killed in the streets. Bangladesh has been led by a caretaker government since Sheikh Hasina, who led the crackdown, fled the country.

The BNP’s Tarique Rahman, set to become Bangladesh’s next prime minister, greeted supporters on Friday, saying he was “grateful for the love” they had shown him. He promised throughout BNP’s campaign to restore democracy in Bangladesh.

Mahdi Amin, BNP’s election steering committee spokesperson, said Rahman pledged that, as prime minister, he would safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens.

Thursday’s vote passed largely peacefully, and, despite alleging “inconsistencies and fabrications” during the vote count, Jamaat accepted the outcome of the election on Saturday.

BNP had recently lost its former chairperson, Khaleda Zia – Tarique Rahman’s mother and a two-time prime minister – who died on December 30.

Khaleda Zia had led the party to power in 1991 and again in 2001. Two decades later, her son has returned the BNP to government.

At the party’s Gulshan office that afternoon, BNP activist Kamal Hossain stood among a jubilant crowd. Visibly emotional, he reflected on what he described as years of repression.

“For so long, I felt the regime of Sheikh Hasina would never go,” he said. Referring to the July 2024 uprising that forced her to flee, he added: “Now people have given us this mandate. We have taken back Bangladesh.”

Hossain said the new government’s immediate priorities should be job creation and curbing inflation.

“Prices have been hurting us, and there are too many unemployed young people. The government must address this immediately,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, remained unusually quiet on Friday.

The calm was largely by design: the BNP chose not to hold victory processions.

The Jamaat head office in the capital’s Moghbazar also appeared subdued on Friday. A few supporters around the head office expressed disappointment.

“There has been engineering in the counting process, and the media has been biased against the Jamaat alliance,” said Abdus Salam, a supporter near the office. He argued that a fair process would have yielded more seats.

Others, like Germany-based Jamaat supporter Muaz Abdullah, said Jamaat’s defeat was a failure of organisation.

“In many constituencies, Jamaat didn’t run a good election campaign. They didn’t even have proper polling agents in several places,” he said.

Though the BNP and Jamaat were allies for years, they faced each other as rivals in this election. The campaign period saw sporadic violence and months of divisive online rhetoric.

Sujan Mia, a BNP activist outside the party office, struck a conciliatory tone. “We do not want enmity. We should focus on building the nation,” he said.

Rezaul Karim Rony, editor of Joban Magazine and a political analyst who closely followed the BNP’s campaign, said the party’s victory is likely to allay concerns of a lurch to the right in Bangladesh.

“Through this election, people have, in a sense, freed the country’s politics from that risk,” he argued.

However, Rony cautioned that the real test begins now.

“The challenge is to ensure good governance, law and order, and public safety – and to establish a rights-based state,” he said, describing those goals as being at the “heart of the aspirations of the 2024 mass uprising.”

Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, said a BNP victory represents “a blow to the politics of change that have galvanised Bangladesh since the 2024 mass uprising”.

“The BNP, dynastic and long saddled with corruption allegations, reflects the principles that the Gen Z protesters rejected,” he said.

The party will now face pressure from both the public and the opposition to push beyond old political habits, Kugelman added.

“If the new government falls back on repressive or retributive politics, reform advocates will be disappointed and democratisation efforts will be set back,” he said.

The outcome might be the least disruptive for the region as a whole.

Pakistan might have preferred a Jamaat win, given the party’s historical affinity for Islamabad. But Pakistan has also had strong relations with the BNP, Kugelman pointed out, as has China.

And “India much prefers the BNP to Jamaat,” he added, noting that the BNP is no longer in alliance with Jamaat, which New Delhi believes takes positions contrary to its interests.

Back at the BNP’s office in Dhaka, however, geopolitics felt distant.

Shamsud Doha, a party leader, had brought his two grandchildren to share the moment.

“Nothing matches this feeling,” he said. “We have long suffered under autocratic rule. Now it is our time to build the nation.”