The politics of Venezuela are conducted under what is nominally a federal presidential republic, but is in practice an authoritarian system of government. Prior to the early 1990s, Venezuela was considered an unusually long-standing and stable liberal democracy in Latin America, having transitioned to democracy in 1958. According to the V-Dem Democracy indices Venezuela was in 2023 the third least electoral democratic country in Latin America.
Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez was a Venezuelan politician and academician who was the 46th and 51st president of Venezuela from 1969 to 1974 and again from 1994 to 1999, thus becoming the longest serving democratically elected politician to govern the country in the twentieth century.
The National Assembly is the legislature for Venezuela that was first elected in 2000. It is a unicameral body made up of a variable number of members, who were elected by a "universal, direct, personal, and secret" vote partly by direct election in state-based voting districts, and partly on a state-based party-list proportional representation system. The number of seats is constant, each state and the Capital district elected three representatives plus the result of dividing the state population by 1.1% of the total population of the country. Three seats are reserved for representatives of Venezuela's indigenous peoples and elected separately by all citizens, not just those with indigenous backgrounds. For the 2010 to 2015 the number of seats was 165. All deputies serve five-year terms. The National Assembly meets in the Federal Legislative Palace in Venezuela's capital, Caracas.
Presidential elections were held in Venezuela on 6 December 1998. The main candidates were Hugo Chávez, a career military officer who led a coup d'état against then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992; and former Carabobo Governor Henrique Salas Römer. Both candidates represented newly formed parties, a first in a country where the main candidates always represented the parties of the bipartisanship. Chávez represented the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), while Salas Römer represented Project Venezuela. Initially weak in the polls, Chávez ran on an anti-corruption and anti-poverty platform, condemning the two major parties that had dominated Venezuelan politics since 1958; and began to gain ground in the polls after the previous front runners faded. Despite the fact that the major parties endorsed Salas Römer, Chávez was elected into his first term as President of Venezuela.
Elections in Venezuela are held at a national level for the President of Venezuela as head of state and head of government, and for a unicameral legislature. The President of Venezuela is elected for a six-year term by direct election plurality voting, and is eligible for re-election. The National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional) has 277 members (diputados), elected for five-year terms using a mixed-member majoritarian representation system. Elections also take place at state level and local level.
Democratic Action is a Venezuelan social democratic and centre-left political party established in 1941. The party played an important role in the early years of Venezuelan democracy, leading the government during Venezuela's first democratic period (1945–1948). A decade of dictatorship under Marcos Pérez Jiménez followed, which saw AD excluded from power. With the advent of democracy in 1958, four Presidents of Venezuela came from Acción Democrática from the 1950s to the 1990s during the two-party period with COPEI.
COPEI, also referred to as the Social Christian Party or Green Party, is a Christian democratic party in Venezuela. The acronym stands for Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, but this provisional full name has fallen out of use. The party was influential during the twentieth century as a signatory of the Puntofijo Pact and influenced many politicians throughout Latin America at its peak.
The Radical Cause, stylized as La Causa Я, is a minor left-wing political party in Venezuela, and today part of the Venezuelan opposition to president Nicolás Maduro.
The National Convergence is a political party in Venezuela.
The Puntofijo Pact was a formal arrangement arrived at between representatives of Venezuela's three main political parties in 1958, Acción Democrática (AD), COPEI, and Unión Republicana Democrática (URD), for the acceptance of the 1958 presidential elections and the preservation of the new democratic system. The pact was a written guarantee that the signing parties would respect the election results, prevent single-party hegemony, share power, and collaborate to prevent dictatorship.
The People's Electoral Movement was a left-wing political party in Venezuela, founded in 1967 by Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa.
The Republic of Venezuela, also sometimes referred to as the Fourth Republic of Venezuela[es], was a democratic republic first established in 1953, and replaced in 1999 by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Venezuela saw ten years of military dictatorship from 1948 to 1958. After the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état brought an end to a three-year experiment in democracy, a triumvirate of military personnel controlled the government until 1952, when it held presidential elections. These were free enough to produce results unacceptable to the government, leading them to be falsified and to one of the three leaders, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, assuming the Presidency. His government was brought to an end by the 1958 Venezuelan coup d'état, which saw the advent of democracy with a transitional government under Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal in place until the December 1958 elections. Prior to the elections, three of the main political parties, Acción Democrática, COPEI and Unión Republicana Democrática, with the notable exclusion of the Communist Party of Venezuela, signed up to the Puntofijo Pact power-sharing agreement.
General elections were held in Venezuela on 1 December 1968. The presidential election was won by Rafael Caldera of Copei, who received 29.1% of the vote. Acción Democrática remained the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate. Voter turnout was 96.7% in the presidential election and 94.5% in the Congressional elections. When Caldera took office in March 1969, it marked the first time in Venezuela's history as an independent nation that the sitting government peacefully transferred power to an elected member of the opposition.
The 2010 parliamentary election in Venezuela took place on 26 September 2010 to elect the 165 deputies to the National Assembly. Venezuelan opposition parties, which had boycotted the previous election thus allowing the governing Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) to gain a two-thirds super majority, participated in the election through the Coalition for Democratic Unity (MUD). In 2007 the Fifth Republic Movement dissolved and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela was formed as the leading government party. Nationally, the popular vote was split equally between PSUV and MUD, but PSUV won a majority of the first-past-the-post seats and consequently retained a substantial majority in the Assembly, although falling short of both two-thirds and three-fifths super majority marks.
The Chamber of Deputies was the lower house of Venezuela's legislative under its 1961 constitution; the Venezuelan Senate was the upper house. Under the 1999 constitution, the bicameral system was replaced by the unicameral National Assembly of Venezuela.
General elections were held in Venezuela on 14 December 1947. The presidential elections were won by Rómulo Gallegos of Democratic Action, who received 74.3% of the vote, the largest presidential win in Venezuela's modern history. His party won 83 of the 110 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 38 of the 46 seats in the Senate.
Constituent Assembly elections were held in Venezuela on 30 November 1952. After the elections, it was planned that the Assembly would nominate a provisional president and then draft a new constitution. Although taking place under military dictatorship, with the main opposition party banned, the election was fair enough to permit early results showing an unexpected defeat for the ruling military junta as the Democratic Republican Union won 62.8% of the vote. The junta then blocked the final results from being published and installed General Marcos Pérez Jiménez as provisional President, an outcome confirmed by the Constituent Assembly, which the opposition parties boycotted.
Constituent Assembly elections were held in Venezuela on 25 July 1999, following a referendum in April on convening one.
The Comisión para la Reforma del Estado was a Presidential Commission created in 1984 by President Jaime Lusinchi to examine the reform of the Venezuelan state and political system. The 35-member commission included 18 independents, as well 9 members from Democratic Action and 5 from COPEI.
El Trienio Adeco was a three-year period in Venezuelan history, from 1945 to 1948, under the government of the popular party Democratic Action. The party gained office via the 1945 Venezuelan coup d'état against President Isaías Medina Angarita, and held the first democratic elections in Venezuelan history, beginning with the 1946 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election. The 1947 Venezuelan general election saw Democratic Action formally elected to office, but it was removed from office shortly after in the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état.
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