For much of the last decade, chavismo has been described either as a regime surviving on inertia or as a system permanently on the verge of collapse. Both readings assume a level of rigidity that no longer fits the evidence. What Venezuela is living under today is neither chaos nor grand design, but something more flexible and more dangerous: an authoritarian system that has learned how to improvise.
This distinction matters. Regime learning does not mean the end of improvisation. On the contrary, it means knowing when to improvise, when to retreat, and when to pretend there was a plan all along. In Venezuela, the regime’s advantage has never been strategic sophistication, but adaptive resilience.
Every effective political actor operating under existential pressure must be able to solve problems on the fly. The Venezuelan regime has done this repeatedly. Faced with mass protests, electoral shocks, international sanctions, or diplomatic isolation, it has shown a consistent ability to regroup, recalibrate, and re-enter the field. This improvisational capacity is not accidental. It is enabled by structural advantages the opposition does not possess: control over territory, weapons, institutions, and the coercive apparatus of the state. Perhaps most importantly, what these assets buy: time. As with almost everything else in Venezuela, time is not democratic.
Of course, the regime would prefer a decisive victory. But over the last several years, neither decisive victory nor ideological closure has been necessary. For chavismo, tactical retreat does not imply strategic defeat. It only needs to survive the next shock. A misstep can be absorbed, reframed, or quietly undone. Improvisation works best when failure does not threaten survival. The same is rarely true for the opposition, where failure often carries near-fatal consequences.
Opposition movements, by contrast, have tended to think systematically. They rely on roadmaps, timelines, and narratives that make sense not only domestically but internationally. This has brought real benefits: legitimacy, recognition, and sustained external support. But it has also imposed constraints. Slogans harden into commitments, commitments into expectations, and expectations narrow the room for maneuver. La Salida, the National Assembly of 2015, “cese de la usurpación, gobierno de transición, elecciones libres,” and more recently hasta el final were not merely rhetorical devices. They were frameworks that structured behavior and raised the cost of deviation. Corners are useful defensively. They are far less forgiving when you paint yourself into one and need to move.
Opposition strategies shift from ambiguity to high-risk bets, swings taken not because the odds are favorable but because the stakes are existential (…) The opposition often plays under sudden-death conditions.
Recent opposition leadership has shown greater awareness of these traps. María Corina Machado, in particular, has so far navigated the terrain with more sophistication than her predecessors. Strategic ambiguity has functioned as a way to preserve optionality in an environment that punishes premature clarity. In this context, ambiguity is not indecision but insurance. Yet insurance premiums rise over time. Strategic ambiguity works best when no single actor controls the clock, which in Venezuela belongs entirely to the regime. External allies, domestic supporters, and internal rivals eventually demand definition. What begins as flexibility risks being recast as hesitation, or worse, as accumulated opportunity cost.
I have argued before that strategic ambiguity can create unexpected openings for the opposition. What matters now is how the regime has learned to anticipate and narrow those openings.
At certain moments, like the one Venezuela is now entering, optionality collapses. Delay becomes indistinguishable from defeat. Opposition strategies shift from ambiguity to high-risk bets, swings taken not because the odds are favorable but because the stakes are existential. These moments expose the core asymmetry: the regime can lose a round and remain in the game. The opposition often plays under sudden-death conditions. Improvisation under those circumstances looks less like adaptability than desperation, and Venezuelan voters tend to punish desperation. This means opposition actors learn under harsher constraints.
While opposition debates play out publicly, the regime has been adjusting more quietly. Under Delcy Rodríguez, the relationship with the United States has been reclassified. Washington no longer needs to function exclusively as an existential enemy in a revolutionary script. It can serve instead as a transactional counterpart, engaged or antagonized as conditions require.
This shift has been accompanied by a rapid change in political aesthetics. Senior regime figures have returned to X. Diosdado Cabello appears in a suit shaking the hands of European diplomats before justifying the steps the regime has been taking in its rapprochements towards the United States. Revolutionary excess has given way to bureaucratic normality. Performing confrontation has become less useful than performing administration.
Even symbols have life cycles. The regime will continue to invoke Maduro’s “captivity” and mourn those who fell defending him. But the narrative of Nicolás Maduro as a kidnapped or persecuted president awaiting redemption continues to fade, not because it was disproven, but because it outlived its usefulness. As Orwell understood, in authoritarian systems, leaders can always be repurposed.
The regime absorbs failure without discarding experience. The opposition, by contrast, renews itself through rupture.
Recent economic and social measures follow the same logic. Policy adjustments signal pragmatism and stability to external actors while leaving the internal balance of power untouched. Liberalization is selective. Repression is backgrounded, not removed. The loaded gun remains on the table, conveniently covered.
The moral asymmetry in Venezuela is absolute. An authoritarian regime that imprisons, tortures, and kills cannot be meaningfully compared to a democratic opposition struggling, often heroically, under conditions designed to break it.
Yet politics is not decided by moral standing alone. What has allowed chavismo to survive repeated crises is not ideological coherence but organizational learning. The regime absorbs failure without discarding experience. The opposition, by contrast, renews itself through rupture. Leaders are consumed by disappointment and replaced, taking with them whatever institutional memory they accumulated. Each cycle leaves the movement cleaner in principle, but poorer in adaptive capacity.
Regime learning in Venezuela is not about brilliance. It is about survivability. The regime can afford to improvise because time works in its favor, because failure is absorbable, and because retreat is not existential. The opposition operates under permanent endgame conditions. Every bet is final and every pause carries a cost.
This is why the regime’s turn toward normality matters. Not because it reflects genuine reform, but because it reshapes the criteria by which politics is judged. The longer chavismo is allowed to fail without consequence and return intact, the narrower the space for disruption becomes. In Venezuelan politics, the decisive advantage is not moral clarity or strategic daring, but the ability to lose, reset, and come back, while your adversary cannot.
