Economic war justifies incumbent’s advantage

The CNE has still to give an exact date for the parliamentary elections scheduled for this year, but the PSUV’s primaries to be held in June 28 provides a glimpse into the discourse the government will use from now until the end of year campaign.

Not shy to use the government’s media advantage, Maduro “ceded” yesterday his weekly television show in public television “En Contacto con Maduro”, to the PSUV’s 1,162 primary candidates so that they can “go to the streets, under equal conditions, to create awareness, to mobilize the people, with unity, to prepare the victory for the 2015 Assembly [elections].”

Such advantage for the ruling PSUV party is justified, according to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN), because the campaign by “the right” will be “predictable, clear, and direct: they seek nothing else but to attack the people with the economic war, which has been characterized by hoarding, usury, boycott, and the unlimited increase of prices, especially of basic products.”

Maduro further explained that “it is not a secret that the great capitalists, owners of the distribution and commerce chains in the country, are allied with the Venezuelan ultra-right in waging an economic war.”

AVN adds this paragraph of factual information to its press note in order to help the reader contextualize the news:

“To this [economic] war it is necessary to add other destabilization strategies of the right, such as the ‘Jericho Operation’, dismantled in the beginning of this year: the plan was to co-opt military officers with the aim of generating subversive actions in the country such as the bombing of ‘tactic objectives’ such as the Miraflores Palace, the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Court, the White Palace, the Military Intelligence building, and the TV channel TELESUR.”