No internal democracy for PSUV because of conspiracies

President Maduro explained yesterday why the ruling PSUV party has decided to pick its candidates for the upcoming Municipal Elections of December 18^th by a “unitary method of evaluation, consultation, and decision,” and not through primaries.

For Maduro, primaries risk a “permanent threat from individualist passions of some people that aspire to public office with suspicious powers (…), suspicious in today’s juncture, with an ongoing imperialist offensive, with plans to assassinate leaders of the revolution, including me, with a psychological war unleashed as never before.”

He also advances the argument that opposition party Primero Justicia (PJ) could, in the case of internal PSUV primaries, finance parallel counterrevolutionary candidates with money from “the Empire”: “The north American elites have been building up force (…), it is a decadent but dangerous elite, and they have been building a force here. What is the yellow bourgeoisie [PJ]? (…) The yellow bourgeoisie has been expanding its tentacles, it is a neo-fascist project, and its advance is financed with money from the American embassy, we have proofs of illicit money for the conformation of a concrete political project.”

Primaries, according to Maduro, will not be held again in the PSUV until “the culture of carnival democracy of the bourgeois culture” is overcome by a “socialist ethics.”