Why Venezuela Isn't on the Verge

Despite massive protests and growing economic desperation, the Maduro government hasn’t lost power.

- Ethan Bronner and Andrew Rosati

The judge is shaking. Never mind that she’s sitting in her office dressed with the tasteful elegance of a jurist, a large painting of Venezuela’s national hero, Simón Bolívar, on one wall, water colors on another. She’s just returned from an event at the Supreme Court, which should be a monument to the objective application of law. But the gathering was a political rally with singing and dancing and a fervently applauded speech about the need to emasculate the nation’s legislative body—the single institution not in the hands of the ruling socialist party.

“I don’t know how my colleagues live with themselves,” she says, her hands trembling as she removes her eyeglasses, rubs her temples, and then shuffles some papers. “Government ministers and military officers go freely up to the constitutional chamber,” she says, where high court justices hear the most important cases. The president hasn’t lost one in years. After the opposition sat three lawmakers whose election was disputed, the court declared the legislature essentially illegitimate.

From a distance, Venezuela, with its crashing oil prices and alarming shortages, appears on the brink of political upheaval. Almost 1 million people marched in Caracas on Sept. 1 to pressure President Nicolás Maduro into allowing a referendum for his recall. The overturning of leftist populism— sweeping across commodity dependent South America from Argentina to Brazil to Peru—seems on its way here, the country where the movement had its most elaborate flowering.