Falcon Crest? Millennium Falcon? The Maltese one?

Good news guys, the inscription for presidential election is over, we know all the names. They are all chavistas.  Even if the propaganda network TeleSur says without blushing that the opposition has registered ITS candidate under the name of Henri Falcon.

La oposición tiene su candidato. #VenezuelaDecide pic.twitter.com/761XdvCFh6

— Patricia Villegas (@pvillegas_tlSUR) February 27, 2018

So many things wrong with that picture......
More tan anything else the smiling face of Tibisay Lucena is going to kill any chances of Henri Falcon. Never mind that in another picture they actually hugged.  See, if you are late in the game, Tibisay Lucena as the head of the electoral board CNE was the numero uno reason why the dialogue/negotiation in Santo Domingo failed.  But who cares, really?

So Maduro has the field he wanted ahead of him. I think 3 non entities, a preacher and Henri Falcon anointed by TeleSur and state media as THE opposition candidate. Never mind that the opposition alliance MUD decided not to run and that Henri Falcon was certainly not chosen through primary or any other type of mechanism.  But who cares, really?

Besides being now near unanimously reviled by the opposition, made the worse through his cosines with Tibisay, Falcon has absolutely no credibility from the start. Why? He lost his reelection bid in Lara last October.  That is right, he failed to be reelected in his home state, by a not insignificant margin and three months later he wants to run for national office.  But who cares, really?

In fact many care.  To begin with Maduro cares. Falcon was the ideal candidate to run "against" him. As an ex chavista he is perceived by them as a traitor so he is the least likely of the opposition candidates to peel away from Maduro chavista core vote. True, many chavistas have voted for Falcon but those were never the hard core chavistas who always kept voting against him in Lara.  And now that the Falcon betrayal of the MUD is made official I predict that he will not get much more than a couple of hundred thousand votes, if he stays in the race until the end.  Even if by miracle the MUD were to decide to back him within the next few weeks there will not be enough time to generate adequate enthusiasm for Falcon, that needed enthusiasm to staff with witnesses all polling stations in Venezuela as the only way to limit the extent of chavismo fraud. He has 0 chances of winning. Zero. Nada.  Unless Maduro dies, a revolution or some dark matter cosmic event that propels him.

Some inside the MUD also care about Falcon run.  Those are the ones that somehow think that the regime can be beaten in an unsupervised election of epic unfair rules and they are too afraid that Falcon may pull the stunt.  Yes, it is amazing but there are those inside the MUD, after 20 years....

But reality is that nobody is going to pay much attention to Falcon inside the MUD. As of today his political career is all but over. So why did Falcon run anyway? 

There is always the hubris clause, and of that he has shown a lot already, not understanding why Lara rejected him, feeling a victim when in fact people took him into account. But as an ex chavista in truth Falcon is not quite comfortable with the expression "personal accounting".

There is also the revenge against the MUD. After all it is clear that he would not win any primary against inside the MUD. So might as well try something desperate outside.  IF he does well enough, say 10%, he could leverage this into a seat back at the MUD table.  But I doubt it, I do not share his kind of hubris.

There is always the conspiracy theory that Falcon has registered so as to withdraw at some point in favor of X.  Yeah, right...

Alternatively his hubris makes him do that to become a "transition" figure....

Or that knowing his career is pretty much over he has accepted to be some kind of Trojan horse at the service of Maduro. Chavismo will pay for his campaign because they need him to pull enough votes to make the reelection of Maduro credible. Unfortunately to even consider some credibility the regime would have to manufacture at least 30% of votes for Falcon. Honestly, do you think that chavismo would manufacture a single vote for Falcon?  At this point it is more feasible for chavismo to print enough votes for Maduro to get 65% (which he has already announced) than to bother about what happens with the other candidates.

And of course, chavismo paying for his campaign will allow for Falcon to cash in enough to ensure him and his family a comfortable retirement outside of Venezuela..... Sue me!

In short, Falcon is the latest installment of chavismo theatrics, or rather, vaudeville.

The Millenium Falcon cryptically covered in chavista red foulard.
Coincidence?  Me thinks not.