democracy

European Parliament’s Vice President Pina Picierno says Hsiao Bi-khim’s visit ‘was kept secret until her arrival to protect her participation’ in the conference.

Taiwanese Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim is making a rare visit to Europe, attending a forum on democracy in Italy alongside the island’s foreign minister, the presidential office said.

Hsiao has been invited to attend the Ventotene Conference for Freedom and Democracy, and is travelling with Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung, the presidential office said in a brief statement.

Other details will be provided once the two return to Taiwan from the Italian island of Ventotene, it added,

While Taiwan’s foreign ministers occasionally visit Europe and other parts of the world that have no formal ties to the Chinese-claimed island, it is rare for an official as senior as the vice president to do so, given the risk of backlash from Beijing against the host nation.

Pina Picierno, vice president of the European Parliament, said Hsiao’s planned participation “was kept secret until her arrival to protect her participation” in the conference.

“No one can determine who can be hosted on European soil, what voices can be heard, and what presences must be hidden,” Picierno said in a Facebook post. “It is a simple and very clear message: intimidation cannot decide who participates in our democratic debate.”

“Freedom of debate is not negotiable with autocracies. And Ventotene, more than ever today, must continue to be the place where freedom and democracy are defended without fear,” she added.

The Ventotene conference takes place from Thursday until Saturday this week. Italy, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and president of Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties, is also expected to participate in the conference.

China says Taiwan is one of its provinces, a view the democratically governed island strongly rejects.

Last November, Hsiao spoke at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China’s annual summit, held in the European Parliament in Brussels.

One of the most complex concepts in political science is democracy. While we all have a feel for what it is, whether it is elections, civil liberties, freedom of speech, or a combination of all of the above, it’s rather complicated to measure how democratic a country is. In a context like Venezuela’s rapidly evolving political environment, it’s essential to have a benchmark to evaluate whether the transition the country is experiencing is toward democracy or toward something entirely different. 

Now, a group of political scientists is proposing one way to measure it: comparing it to the installation of an operating system.

“Installing Democracy” is a project led by political scientists Beatriz Fernández and Pablo Hernández Borges to operationalize democracy in Venezuela. It’s part of Umbral, an initiative created by Hernández Borges after January 3rd to evaluate the possible outcomes of Venezuela’s political crisis, drawing from experts and the public. 

Hernández Borges said the initiative emerged partly as a way to combat misinformation, “with the goal of showing citizens that a transition is a very complex process and that it will not happen quickly. This platform sheds light on the path toward transition at a moment when people feel that democracy is at the threshold of possibility.”

A group of experts then independently evaluates each action on a scale from 0 to 100% based on the available evidence. Their assessments are aggregated into a common estimate.

The new branch of the project, rather than presenting potential outcomes, shows a progress bar from 0 to 100%. The project’s creators envision democracy holistically, rather than as an “on and off switch.” Their methodology divides the transition into 11 pillars, ranging from human rights, security, and institutions to political competition, elections, justice, and the economy. 

To calculate the percentage shown on the dashboard, the project identifies 60 key variables consisting of tangible events, timeframes, and verifiable indicators. These include the release of political prisoners, the opening of the electoral registry, press freedom, the renewal of electoral authorities and, eventually, the holding of free elections. Drawing from existing proposals for Venezuela’s democratic transition, the project organizes these actions along an 18-month timeline starting in August 2026, with each one assigned a deadline, an indicator, and a source of verification. A group of experts then independently evaluates each action on a scale from 0 to 100% based on the available evidence, and their assessments are aggregated into a common estimate.

The resulting score places each action into one of four categories: completed, in progress, pending or unfulfilled, or not yet evaluable. This structure allows the dashboard to capture an uneven transition. Currently, it lists the installation of democracy at 7%.  

The identities of the 13 expert evaluators are kept anonymous. “They are a highly qualified group. They are Venezuelan academics, both inside and outside the country. There’s also a group of Spanish academics with expertise in transitions and knowledge of the Venezuelan context,” said Beatriz Fernández.

“These are not variables like measuring a kilo of sugar, whether it’s 800 or 783 grams. We don’t have the precision of the hard sciences. This is an informed approximation…”

Fernández joined Umbral with “Installing Democracy” after previously working with Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, a leading global research project that measures different dimensions of democracy across countries using hundreds of indicators and assessments from country experts. Her experience with V-Dem helped inform the project’s approach, alongside elements drawn from presidential performance trackers.

Still, Fernández acknowledged that measuring democracy is particularly complicated. “These are not variables like measuring a kilo of sugar, whether it’s 800 or 783 grams. We don’t have the precision of the hard sciences. This is an informed approximation, which is what experts do and which is valid.”

When users log into “Installing Democracy”, they can see the individual variables, the entity responsible for each aspect of the transition, the verifiable indicators, and the overall progress bar for each of the “milestones” of Venezuela’s potential democratic transition. In addition, it’s possible to see the progress, stagnation or backsliding of each milestone. Moreover, the dashboard includes countdowns for the scheduled end of the negotiation table between the interim authorities and the 2015 National Assembly, the US Midterm elections, and the end of the proposed 18-month roadmap.

Ultimately, the purpose of the project is to show audiences that the discussion of democracy goes deeper than whether elections are held or not. Fernández and Hernández Borges emphasize that the conditions under which those elections take place, and whether their results are respected, are just as important. In fact, they argue that projects like this one invite citizens to think beyond elections as the “be-all and end-all” of a democratic transition and, as their press release puts it, to evaluate “the forest rather than the latest event.” At 7%, the forest is still very much taking shape.

For the first time in years, Venezuela is discussing institutional change as something more concrete than an opposition demand. The talks between the two National Assemblies have embraced the problem of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), with the electoral authority next in line. New magistrates, new CNE rectors, new elections: after decades of institutional capture, replacing the people who run these bodies is obviously necessary.

The danger is believing it will be enough.

Venezuela has spent the last quarter of century demonstrating that its democratic decline cannot be reduced to bad people occupying important offices. Chavismo did not merely place loyalists inside the State. It gradually transformed the relationships between institutions so that political power could survive electoral setbacks.

The clearest example came after 2015. When the opposition won a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, chavismo did not accept that voters had changed the institutional balance of the country. The TSJ then progressively neutralized the newly elected Assembly. When that was no longer enough, the government created a Constituent Assembly capable of bypassing it altogether.

This adaptability matters for the transition now being negotiated.

Chavismo’s institutional principle has never really been presidentialism. It has been simpler: power should remain wherever chavismo remains.

Venezuela is extraordinarily centralized, and there is good reason to believe that no political project can govern effectively without controlling the presidency. But it would be a mistake to assume that the presidency will remain as powerful after chavismo loses it as it was while chavismo controlled the rest of the State.

A democratic president facing a chavista supermajority in the National Assembly and a hostile Supreme Court could discover rather quickly that Venezuela’s supposedly omnipotent presidency is considerably less omnipotent than advertised.

Chavismo’s institutional principle has never really been presidentialism. It has been simpler: power should remain wherever chavismo remains. That is why replacing the people at the top of Venezuela’s institutions is only the beginning of reinstitutionalization.

We have tried this before

The CNE should make us particularly cautious.

In 2021, Roberto Picón and Enrique Márquez joined an electoral board that was widely regarded as the most balanced Venezuela had seen in years. Both pushed for meaningful improvements, and international observers recognized that the new composition produced a better electoral environment than the one that preceded it. The Carter Center described the board as “less unbalanced,” while still documenting structural problems surrounding electoral competition.

The episode demonstrated the limits of solving institutional problems through personnel alone. An election is not defined solely by what five CNE rectors do on election night. It also depends on who can register to vote, which candidates can run, whether parties can organize, how public resources are used, what media can report, what security forces do, and which court ultimately resolves a dispute.

Barinas provided the almost perfect illustration. After the 2021 gubernatorial election, the TSJ intervened while the vote was still being resolved, invoked a political disqualification against the opposition candidate and ordered the election repeated. Picón and Márquez publicly dissented. The independent rectors were there. The larger machinery around them remained capable of overruling the political meaning of the vote.

A good rector can behave honorably inside a bad system. The same is true of judges.

“Non-repetition” cannot mean guaranteeing that chavismo disappears from Venezuelan politics.

Replacing the current Supreme Court with independent jurists would be an enormous democratic achievement. Even so, courts lack enforcement mechanisms for a reason, meaning that the armed forces or the police could ignore their rulings, or that, as chavismo has already done, the president du jour could resort to the military court system. But Venezuela should also be asking whether a future court should retain all the powers that chavismo accumulated and exploited through it.

Otherwise, the transition risks producing institutions that are safe only for as long as good people control them.

That is not institutional reform. It is institutional trust.

And democracies are supposed to require less of it.

Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell made this distinction precisely when he wrote about the weakness of “horizontal accountability” in Latin American democracies. Elections determine who governs, but democracy also requires institutions capable of restraining those winners once they do. A president who receives millions of votes is still bound by courts, legislatures, and rules that do not derive their legitimacy from his personal mandate.

Venezuela inverted that principle. Institutions increasingly became instruments for preserving whoever already controlled them. Changing their occupants without changing that logic would leave the central vulnerability untouched.

What non-repetition actually means

This is where the transition needs a more demanding definition of success. “Non-repetition” cannot mean guaranteeing that chavismo disappears from Venezuelan politics.

A democratic Venezuela should permit a chavista party to reorganize, contest elections and, if voters choose it again someday, return to government. Democracy cannot mean competitive elections until the people we dislike win one.

Nor does democratic consolidation require Venezuela to eliminate every trace of authoritarian nostalgia. Spain still contains defenders of Franco. Chile still contains defenders of Pinochet. Their democratic success is not that those political traditions vanished, but that political competition became overwhelmingly organized around institutions that survived changes of government.

Nicaragua, on the other hand, demonstrates what happens when that consolidation remains incomplete.

The Sandinistas lost the 1990 election and surrendered the presidency. Daniel Ortega remained in politics, competed repeatedly, and eventually returned through elections in 2006. This democratic failure was certainly exacerbated when Nicaragua’s institutions proved unable to stop Ortega from progressively dismantling the democratic constraints that had made his return possible in the first place. Research on Nicaragua’s backsliding traces how electoral rules, courts and other institutions were gradually eroded on the road back to authoritarianism.

If judicial independence depends on always selecting virtuous magistrates, the judiciary has not been fixed.

That is the warning Venezuela should take seriously.

Non-repetition does not mean ensuring that Venezuelans never again elect someone with authoritarian instincts. It means building institutions capable of surviving when they do. And that standard has an uncomfortable implication for whoever eventually replaces chavismo.

The next democratic government should not ask only which powers it needs in order to govern. It should ask whether it would be comfortable leaving those same powers to its worst political adversary. That is the test that should apply to the new TSJ, the new CNE and eventually every institution rebuilt during the transition.

If electoral integrity depends on always appointing five excellent rectors, the electoral system has not been fixed. If judicial independence depends on always selecting virtuous magistrates, the judiciary has not been fixed. If the survival of democracy depends on trusting whoever occupies Miraflores, Venezuela has learned very little from the last twenty-five years.

The current negotiations can replace officials. They can make credible elections possible again. They can remove some of the people who converted public institutions into instruments of political control. All of that is necessary. But Venezuela’s democratic challenge will not be solved by transferring those instruments to new hands. 

The institutions being negotiated today should be designed not merely to produce the next democratic government, but to survive the next authoritarian one. Otherwise, Venezuela may succeed in changing who holds power without changing what power allows them to do.