Jean-Paul Faguet

And they brought down one after another of their own prime ministers that they had put in place because individual MPs thought, if I keep supporting Liz Truss, you know, there's no way I'm going to lose. There's no way I'm going to get reelected in my constituency. So even there, there's this kind of escape valve within the party if you have an unpopular or unsuccessful government.

To complete the story, the thinking is that whereas first past the post turned small majorities into big electoral, into big legislative differences that then, you know, strong governments that can do what they want to do. That's a good thing in the sense of getting a big change, sending a big signal and getting differences in policy.

The opposite is the continental proportional representation system where you never really get a clean sweep of government or of political parties. Let's say that you have a new election and then some parties go up a few percentage points and other parties go down a few percentage points.

And what happens is you get a minor reshuffling of the government, but often it's the same parties or all but one of the same parties in the new government, which looks a lot like the old government. Same people. Yeah. the British and American systems is like clean sweep. It's like, get out of here. We're tired of Republicans. We're going to have Democrats. We're tired of Democrats.

We're going to have Republicans. Yeah. Right. If things are going pretty well, the continental system is better. Yeah. Right. Because it represents what people, people's honest, um, freely expressed sincere desires better because some people are really sincere green voters and that's what they care about. And some people are really hard right and they're there. They're not being repressed.

Their voices are being heard. When things go bad, what you actually need is a clean sweep and the continental system doesn't provide it.

So I think I would need someone like you to show that mathematically because that's probably beyond my field. But yeah, that's the general wisdom.

Yeah. Okay. So a quick context, Venezuela was the most sophisticated, the richest, and the most politically stable country in Latin America. Venezuela and Argentina usually were competing to be the richest, but Venezuela has a fair claim for a large part of the 20th century. In the 50s, it looked like it was in GDP per capita terms, because it was only about 20 million people.

It looked like it was going to overtake the U.S. The wheels start falling off the cart in 1978. And then in the 90s, things get worse. Hugo Chavez tries to mount a coup. He fails but becomes a big figure and then he actually gets elected president. And at that point, Venezuela goes into really steep decline because these crazy, what he calls 21st century socialism policies, it just like got.

Venezuela had had a highly politically mobilized population where 90% of people were members of a party and 90% of, sorry, were registered as voters and 90% of registered voters voted in elections. Wow. Which, compared to the U.S. or the U.K., is crazy. It's wonderful. It's an unbelievable level of political participation. And the wheels totally fall off the cart.

He dies, Hugo Chávez dies, and he has to live with Inigo Las Maduro, who just makes things worse. And the country is becoming an autocracy. The economy, it had a very sophisticated economy. productive sector in the sense of being an industrializing country where a lot of industries were located in Venezuela and made things that were consumed domestically.

They were even beginning to export some industrial products. All of that gets gutted, and today it's oil. And oil is around the government. The government sucks oil out of the ground, pays off members of the military to continue supporting it. If you're an elite tied in with the government, you do extremely well, and everybody else is

working in the informal sector, selling chewing gum or driving illegal taxis and just like trying to make ends meet. And about a third of the population has fled the country, the largest single number to Colombia. So the opposition says that they have clear evidence, voting evidence, because they were present in as many different voting locations as they could be.

that they won and they won by large double digit majorities. They think that they won something like 70% of the vote and that Maduro is just stealing it, which to me, it looks like that's happening. What is not clear to me is how much evidence do they have? I'm sure they have some evidence, but is it anecdotal or is it really broad evidence?

So I got there just in time for that, just after I'd graduated from an undergraduate. And he held a plebiscite and he was so arrogant, he thought he was going to win it outright. And happily for democracy, he allowed independent observers to be present at all the mesas de votación, the places where people went to vote.

And he allowed a process where each vote was opened and shown publicly to observers and then counted. And then what the Chilean Democratic opposition did was to organize a series of reporters who were just like reading out the results.

And when each Mesa had finished counting, they gave the totals and they relayed this back to Santiago to an independent radio station that was just like calling it out. And so at some point he tried to steal the election. When it became clear he had lost, he was flabbergasted. He had no idea he was gonna lose. When it became clear that he had lost roughly 60-40,

then they turned out the lights on the electoral authority and they tried to steal the election. But by then it was clear because there had been independent observers at every single place where Chileans voted. So, you know, at this point it's just, you know, he's going against reality. And happily Chile is too sophisticated society with too many educated people to allow that to happen.

So are we going to get that kind of thing in Venezuela now or is it going to be able to steal it? And I think it's all down to how much evidence they have.

Yeah, yeah. Vanishingly small. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, that's my intuition is that they were cheating in all kinds of ways. And the question is, are they going to try to – In past elections, I think he would have freely, if they had been free and fair, he would have lost, but it was closer. It's one thing to cheat if you're losing 55-45.