How long can Nicolás Maduro hang on to power in Venezuela?

On Sunday, Election Day in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro posted a surreal video on Twitter, and the clip went viral. It showed Maduro, early in the day, walking through what appears to be an empty public park, surrounded by bodyguards, waving at a crowd of people standing outside the park, so far away that they can barely be seen in the frame.

By the end of the day, Maduro had been reëlected to office. It was the widely predicted outcome, despite his chronically inept handling of his country’s worsening social and economic crisis—one which has seen hyperinflation, severe shortages of food and medicine, a spreading public-health emergency, off-the-charts levels of criminal violence, and an unprecedented exodus of citizens. Sunday’s vote was characterized by an embarrassingly obvious lack of public enthusiasm, with trickles of listless voters showing up at polling stations.

Maduro reportedly received six million votes, or about sixty-eight per cent of the ballots cast. His main rival in the polls, Henri Falcón, a onetime ally of Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez, came away with 1.9 million votes. Venezuela’s mainstream opposition groups had boycotted the election and accused Falcón of being a false-front candidate. Yet, after the returns came in, Falcón, who is now an independent politician, claimed official malfeasance at the polls and rejected the results. A third candidate, an evangelical pastor, received just under a million votes. He, too, cried foul. Maduro, an ebullient man best known for his ability to stay afloat despite always looking like he’s drowning, greeted a rally of his supporters on Sunday night crowing victory. “How they underestimated me!” he declared. “But here we are, triumphant!”

Maduro’s jubilant performance rang hollow, however. According to the official count, a mere forty-six per cent of the electorate bothered to vote, and Maduro garnered one and a half million fewer votes than he did five years ago, when he barely scraped to victory in the elections that were held following Chávez’s death.

Compounding the discontent this weekend was the fact that Maduro’s government had prevented the country’s two most popular opposition politicians—Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo López—from participating in the election. Maduro only just beat out Capriles in the 2013 election, and it is widely thought that if either Capriles or López were allowed on the ballot they would have trounced Maduro. Despite his shaky hold on public support—or, perhaps more precisely, because of it—Maduro lately has made several moves to consolidate his power. Last year, he ordered the use of violent force to quell anti-government protests, resulting in the deaths of some hundred and fifty protesters, many of them young people. Maduro then sidelined the country’s elected National Assembly by pushing through a controversial election to choose members of a new Constituent National Assembly made up of his supporters. These actions have given Maduro sweeping powers and made him an international pariah, referred to as a dictator by his opponents and also by the heads of numerous foreign governments. Among his chief detractors are not only Donald Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron but also many of his neighboring leaders in Latin America, where right-of-center parties now hold power in nations that were formerly allies in the so-called pink tide of leftist governments. The governments in Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Panama, Mexico, and neighboring Colombia—which has taken in the largest number of Venezuela’s economic refugees—are now openly adversarial to Maduro. Among the few regional Presidents to salute Maduro’s victory yesterday were Miguel Díaz-Canel, the recently sworn-in President of Cuba, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

Maduro’s new term, which is to begin in January, 2019, is supposed to go for six years, but there are few Venezuela-watchers who expect him to last that long in office. For one thing, the Trump Administration appears to have resolved, in recent months, that the only way forward for Venezuela is a military coup to oust Maduro and restore the country to its pre-Chávez status as a stable petro-democracy in political lockstep with the United States. (Despite its current economic penuries, Venezuela is a resource-rich nation, with oil reserves that are believed to be the largest in the world.) On Sunday, Vice-President Mike Pence, who has been the public face of the Administration’s posturing on Venezuela, declared the latest election “a sham” that was “neither free nor fair,” and he promised that the U.S. “will not sit idly by as Venezuela crumbles and the misery of their brave people continues.”

This statement by Pence might be considered polite compared to a speech that Juan Cruz, the White House official in charge of affairs in Latin America, gave in Miami a few weeks ago. There he all but openly called for a military coup in Venezuela. After excoriating Maduro as “a madman” who had turned Venezuela into an “oppressive dictatorship,” Cruz said, “We call on every citizen to fulfill their duties outlined in this constitution and urge the military to respect the oath they took to perform their functions. Honor your oath!” Cruz is a veteran C.I.A. official, so it seems safe to suggest that his views reflect those of the U.S. intelligence community. Last year, Trump himself made typically impolitic noises by suggesting that military action might be necessary in Venezuela. On a tour of Latin American capitals at the time, Pence sought to placate leaders who were upset by Trump’s bluster, while also urging them to join American efforts to isolate Maduro’s regime. Many had already done so, forming the so-called Lima Group, an alliance of fourteen nations in the region, including Canada, which had called on Venezuela to suspend the election, calling it “illegitimate and lacking in credibility.” (On Monday, along with the United States, the governments of the Lima Group denounced the election and said that they would not recognize the results.)

Other pressures have also been applied. A rolling series of economic sanctions have been levied by the U.S. Treasury Department against senior members of the Venezuelan leadership, including Maduro himself. In a first for a Latin American country, the Panamanian government recently followed the U.S.’s cue, issuing an advisory concerning Maduro and several dozen Venezuelans considered “high risk” for laundering money and financing terrorism. On Monday, in a new bid to pressure Caracas, Trump signed an executive order banning certain additional U.S. financial transactions with Venezuela, including debt purchases, but he refrained from prohibiting U.S. purchases of Venezuelan crude oil, which amount to about five hundred thousand barrels a day. Last year, an Administration official told me that Trump was unlikely to ban the buying of Venezuelan oil, because such a move would affect employment, and votes, in several Southern, Republican-leaning states where it is refined. In an additional squeeze, Dutch Caribbean courts have authorized the American energy company ConocoPhillips to seize up to $2.6 billion in Venezuelan oil in compensation for property that the Chávez government expropriated in 2007; the move has allowed the company to begin seizing oil cargoes at port facilities leased by Venezuela. Mining companies that have won court decisions involving several billion dollars in claims against Venezuela are similarly moving to reclaim assets, by seeking the seizure of Citgo, which is mostly owned by Venezuela.

As the hemispheric hostilities have escalated, Maduro and his comrades have been customarily defiant. In an interview I conducted with him last August, Maduro scoffed at those demanding his resignation. Motioning to his chair in the Presidential palace, he asked, “If I leave this chair, whom shall we put in it?” Yet increasingly his adversaries argue that anyone else should sit there. In a meeting I had with him not long ago, I asked Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia and one of Maduro’s fiercest critics, if he believed a military coup against Maduro was likely. “Yes, I think so,” Santos said. He spoke of recent arrests of restive Venezuelan military officers by Maduro’s government, and said, “With each day that passes, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there is discontent within the military.” He added that Venezuelan military officers had been “asking questions of the international community to see how it would respond” in the event of a coup. I asked what the international community’s response had been. “The international community is interested for there to be a democracy in Venezuela,” he said. “In my own case, I don’t get involved in internal affairs”—meaning those of other countries—“but what I would like is for democracy to be restored, and anything that sees democracy reëstablished in Venezuela will have the support of the international community.”