Filling the big shoes of a larger than life leader presents special challenges for leadership succession. Under a larger than life leader, the roles and responsibilities of office likely became entangled with the person’s distinctive style.
Inheriting an office dominated by a personality creates incentives to both emphasize the legacies of the predecessor and proceed very carefully in establishing authority. While this risk-averse strategy has pragmatic appeal, it can also carry a high cost. It restricts the government to a self-reinforcing path. By adhering to a predecessor’s policies, a new leader narrows the menu of options to dated policy choices, which may in turn reduce the opportunities for shaping a transition to a new future.
From Chávez to Maduro
In the last three years, oil rich Venezuela has witnessed a succession from the highly charismatic Hugo Chávez to the highly bureaucratic Nicolás Maduro.
From 1999 to 2013, Chávez used personalistic politics and autocratic rule to reshape Venezuelan politics in his image. Two months after winning reelection in 2012, Chávez made two momentous announcements: his cancer was likely terminal, and then-Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro would be his heir.
After Chávez died from cancer in March 2013, Maduro became interim President. Maduro self-consciously styled his role as the inheritor of the founder’s movement, not its standard bearer. This seemed a safe bet. It was premised on buying time for a moment so that Maduro could define his role on his own terms. But Maduro was unconvincing in his efforts to inspire belief, and, on top of this, he did not have time to spare.
Maduro squeaked out a 220,000 vote victory in snap elections held April 14, 2013 in the wake of Chávez’s death. From there, the President’s rule grew steadily more authoritarian and the economy went downhill in a hurry.
We have seen a succession from Chávez to Maduro. But, in the broader scheme, Maduro’s leadership flaws are not what lie behind Venezuela’s recent descent into recession. The transition from Chávez has left Venezuela in a permanent state of crisis, and Maduro’s failed crisis management has brought Venezuela to the brink of a collapse.
Parsing Blame
Chávez placed Maduro in a particularly difficult position to assume leadership over his government. He waited 17 months after receiving a cancer diagnosis to name a successor. Plain and simple, the man who defined Venezuelan politics for over decade botched his exit.
From 2010, Maduro served as Chávez’s Foreign Minister. In this post, Maduro, a former Congressman who entered politics as a union organizer, travelled abroad extensively. But, he did not gain exposure to the domestic public or earn name recognition. Chávez did not incorporate Maduro into the 2012 reelection campaign and, in fact, worked to silence discussion of the succession plans. By guarding the succession process as a top state secret, Chávez only made his successor’s job more difficult.
Maduro did not only take over from the country’s most influential leader and assume formal leadership over the chavista political movement and government organizations that Chávez singlehandedly created and tightly controlled. He also took over after Chávez created an economic crisis.
During the extended oil boom (2005-2012), the Chávez government grew addicted to petrodollars and ignored macroeconomic prudence while working from the mistaken assumption that $100 oil prices were here to stay. Debts and deficits increased, inflation soared, tight state regulations on private commerce created huge distortions, and a fixed exchange rate regime created state corruption and a highly overvalued currency.
Ahead of his reelection campaign in 2012, Chávez ratcheted up spending to record levels. From 2011 to 2012, spending increased 45 percent, and Venezuela imported a record high of $59 billion in goods. Chávez won by a comfortable margin in 2012, but the means used to obtain this victory suggested an inherent weakness: The government’s popularity depended to a great degree on the abundance of consumer goods.
GDP growth of 4 percent and 5.5 percent in 2011 and 2012, respectively, hid the lurking problems. Debt reached 23 percent of GDP in 2012, the black market exchange rate grew to more than double the official rates in October 2012, and sharp increases in prices gave rise to fears that chronically high inflation – averaging 26.5 percent over 2008-2012 – could escalate faster.
In the snap elections held on April 14, 2013, Maduro ran as the interim President thanks to a highly sympathetic ruling by a biased Supreme Court. In the short campaign period, Maduro made reference to Chávez in approximately 30 percent of his public speeches, according to a media content analysis by the Carter Center. But beyond restricting his message to the legitimacy of Chávez’s legacy, Maduro ran into bigger problems. He campaigned like an error-prone rookie – for example, he misnamed an important state company and used city names for states in speeches– and on top of this, had to deal with an opposition that had begun to capitalize on signs of economic discontent. 700,000 votes transferred to the opposition, but Maduro squeaked out a 220,000 vote victory that the opposition rejected as fraudulent.
In office, Maduro rejected an economic plan to make a moderate adjustment and began to face intense popular pressure when shortages of basic goods began occurring, while oil prices remained high in 2014. When oil prices plummeted – Venezuela went from receiving $80 billion from oil in 2013 to around $20-25 billion in 2015 – the country experienced a second major economic contraction of -5.7 percent in 2015 (after a -3.9 percent contraction in 2014). Inflation was at around 200 percent.
Under conditions of stagflation, the country has begun to unravel. Increasingly commonplace lootings of stores are indicators of hunger and desperation, and the breakdown of the rule of law. Shortages of medicine that create life threatening situations for the sick are contributing to a national health crisis that approximates a humanitarian emergency.
Maduro’s response has been to reduce imports and gradually balance fiscal accounts. But these modifications are probably too little too late. Venezuela is projected to have the worst economic performance in the world this year.
Problems Bigger than Chávez or Maduro
Could it have been different for Venezuela under Maduro? This is a question Venezuelans will debate for years to come. Those who maintain that Maduro could have caused less pain may underestimate a basic fact about the system Chávez created.
Though Chávez’s personalism permeated Venezuela politics, his autocratic leadership was arguably more relevant. It led to a model of modern patrimonial rule marked by the military’s central role in government and the economy. The economic crisis and the corruption of this ruling elite are in fact taking a bite out of Chávez’s legacy. A national Venebarometro poll conducted in May 2016 found that 52 percent of the population believes Chávez did not govern well, and that his political platform should be discarded. Forty-nine percent of independents – a group that made up 19 percent of the survey – felt this way.
The damage to Chávez’s legacy makes sense given the scope and intensity of the crisis. It also offers insight into a broader lesson Maduro may wish he had learned earlier.
Paraphrasing the former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, when faced with the challenge of crossing a wide divide, taking incremental steps will not help avoid a fall. Making the cross requires the courage to, at some point, take one big step.
Michael McCarthy is a Research Fellow Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University and a consultant to the Latin America Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He previously consulted as a Senior Analyst for the Carter Center's Venezuela Presidential Election Study Missions in 2012 and 2013.
