Friday, December 11, 2015

The 2015 results: stable majority, where art thou?

I am talking of course of who holds the majority inside the 112 elected representatives. This is of utmost importance because there will be the need for a common front to resist the assaults of the regime, from incarceration to plain bribery. Amen of the required speed to pass urgent laws and go above Maduro's sabotage. The stable majority is also required to agree on a more than likely constitutional reform.

Data gathered from Tal Cual who has assigned party labels to the 112 elected folks.
I have roughly distributed them according to suspected ideology.
Note that in Venezuela EVERYONE claims to be at the very least left of Center.
VENTE (Maria Corina Machado) is the only one openly right of center.
Colors assigned are inasmuch as possible, through Excel, those of the political parties.



The good news is that in spite of the scatter inside that new 112 majority, managing to get the 84 required to get everyday decisions should not be too difficult. Note, those "majority" numbers are from the existence of 55 PSUV that will always vote NO.

The initial weakness of this new assembly is its ability to resist PSUV/Regime pressure. That pressure at first can come from bribes or threats. But as the PSUV makes it through its necessary aggiornamento it is quite possible that some inside the opposition alliance may be tempted to explore dalliances with the PSUV. Thus the next graph where the MUD parties are ranked through what I think are their more leftist to less leftist willingness to seek agreements with the regime. The division is not a comfortable right/left division because some parties, dues to their long time unjustly jailed leader might chose not to speak to the PSUV.

From this figure we can see already that if it is not too difficult for the regime to pry away some members to void the 2/3 supernumerary majority, the one at 3/5 is quite safe for the time being (100). There is simply no way for the regime to get overtime a working bare majority.

Finally we can look at how easy it is to create a majority within that majority, namely 112/2=56 seats. That is the required "inner" majority to lead the rest.

I have put in light lavender the three parties that are more likely to work together on the big issues. And it turns out that they are also the three largest fractions. Between them, UNT, AD and PJ, they would be holding, if Tal Cual is right, 79 which is way more than 56...  And to their right or to their left they can find without much trouble the missing ones to get the 84 parliament simple majority to dispatch everyday matters. I guess that the lone seats from Convergencia and ABP can also be added to the 79 so they are 81. Thus the 3 missing to reach 84 can come on their own from any of 5 other parties which have 3 or more seats.

As I can see for the time being, UNT, AD and PJ are forced to work together, which should not be too difficult at force. Any one of them that can get Voluntad Popular support on a given measure can put pressure on the other two to compromise its way. The minor parties will need to form parliamentary groups to make sure that they can have some influence.

In practical results the presidency and two vice-presidencies of the Assembly will be decided over the three biggies. The smaller players will have to be tamed through commissions chairs and vice chairs.

And chavismo already knows that. Together with the bitterness at some of their defeats (see previous post) goes a long way to explain the panic within Cabello and Maduro entourage....



2 comments:

  1. Can parliament not change the required 2/3rd majority required on major issues to a 3/5th or simple majority as there is no doubt the regime will easily bribed delegates of MUD.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Let Maduro and Cabello elaborate on their seventeen years of errors, the results: devastation in the stores, hunger and fear in the streets, loss of national identity and pride will unite the front. Citizens are tired of seeing Cubans taking home bags of nice things to the Sea of Joy at Christmas full of delicacies and gold while their own Christmas bonuses are hours of waiting in lines to listen to a moron's endless cadenas and seeing his wife's nephews flout every law and tradition to conduct narcotrafficking, and seeing Maria Gabriela Chavez make another hundred million on the NYSE to add to her $4.2 mil milliones in the Imperio and Andorra while they can't even get ibuprofin to fight chikungunya!

    ReplyDelete

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