A democratic counter-revolution

THE parliamentary election that took place in Venezuela on December 6th had been seen by the president, Nicholás Maduro, as a referendum on its “Bolivarian revolution”. The results are in, and the revolution has been resoundingly rejected (see ). The Democratic Unity alliance (MUD), an opposition coalition united by its desire to end the incompetent and authoritarian regime of Mr Maduro and his fellow Bolivarians, won a “supermajority” of two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. This is a catastrophe for the movement founded by Hugo Chávez, a charismatic populist who took power in 1999 and died in 2013, leaving the hapless Mr Maduro in charge.For everyone else, it is a result to be celebrated. The Bolivarians fought dirty: they jailed opposition leaders and banned others from running, nobbled the independent press and put up a sham party to siphon votes away from the MUD. They lost anyway. That is because the government’s delusional policies, conceived to help the poor, are making all Venezuelans suffer bar a corrupt few. Its “21st-century socialism” is a farrago of controls—of prices, foreign exchange and production. When oil prices were high, the country squandered its earnings on subsidies; now earnings from oil have plunged, leading to shortages of basic goods and an inflation rate that is one of the world’s highest. The economy is expected to shrink by 10% this year. Nearly three-quarters of voters turned out; they rejected the government by a whopping 15 percentage points.