Taking a lesson from Venezuela

IN Venezuela on Sunday – Monday afternoon for us here in the Philippines – a most remarkable national event occurred. The oil-rich country, which has struggled socially and economically for 16 years under the left-wing socialist government of first Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and then his hand-picked successor Nicolas Maduro, conducted elections for its National Assembly.

To no one’s surprise, a coalition of opposition parties known as the Democratic Unity Roundtable – in Spanish, the party grouping has the odd acronym MUD – won a resounding victory over Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela. MUD took at least 99 seats in the 167-seat Assembly, against the socialists’ 46, with the final outcome of 22 others yet to be settled. Venezuelan voters, fed up with widespread shortages of basic goods, rampant crime, an antagonistic foreign policy that has turned Venezuela into a bit of a pariah, and persistently high unemployment and poverty rates in a country that is sitting atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves, made their feelings known loud and clear at the ballot box, as expected.