Eager to mask the blights on his years in power, Maduro has adopted new campaign strategies to woo voters.
He joined the video platform TikTok in 2020 and has since amassed more than 2.2 million followers. On Instagram Live broadcasts, he shows off his rallies, where he has sung, danced and prayed with his supporters.
Scrolling through videos on his phone, mototaxi driver Alfred Rajoy speaks animatedly about how he attended one of the recent rallies.
He told Al Jazeera he was proud to be one of the motorcyclists who got close to the president.
Rajoy’s windbreaker jacket testifies to his devotion to the Chavismo movement: The faces of Maduro and Chavez are printed on the front, one on either side of the zipper.
But he acknowledges that Maduro’s government has faced criticism over corruption and its human rights record.
“It’s no secret that we have had failures here, extreme failures. There is some discontent in our communities, throughout the country. Some people close to Nicolas Maduro have done wrong,” Rajoy said.
He also expressed a degree of discomfort with government actions designed to dismantle and discourage the opposition. Dozens of opposition members have been detained in the lead-up to Sunday’s race, and restaurants and hotels that hosted Gonzalez, the rival presidential candidate, have been shut down.
But some supporters dismiss such stories as misinformation — or, worse, fabrications from the opposition and foreign agents.
Guillermo Avila, 24, a Maduro supporter, said he believes many of the criticisms he sees online are the product of opposition manipulation.
“They portray our government as a totalitarian and dictatorial one, but actually, it is a participatory and crucial government,” Avila said. “It offers a space for everyone. We are seeing the country growing economically, where people look happy in the streets.”
But for Gunson, Maduro’s “man of the people” narrative doesn’t hold up against his track record of alleged abuses.
“Maduro styles himself the worker, because he didn’t go to university and he was a bus driver,” Gunson said. “But this is a government that jails trade union leaders for protesting. These are people who have grown rich exploiting the poor, and they claim to be socialists. Contradiction is in their middle name.”
As a result of Maduro’s reputation for tamping down dissent, many opposition voters are concerned the president and his supporters won’t respect a Gonzalez win.
From his living room armchair, Bermudez watches Maduro’s campaigns on his small television set. For him, Maduro losing is inconceivable. The prospect even brought tears to his eyes: “The loss of the election would be the loss of the country, the destruction of Venezuela.”
Other Maduro supporters, however, are less fatalistic about the possibility of an end to nearly 25 years of socialist rule.
“This is a democracy,” said Rajoy. “The most important thing is that people vote — and that the result is respected.”
Both men are eagerly awaiting the results on election day, which, not coincidentally, falls on the late Chavez’s birthday.
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