If I had to think of a country that has been impoverished and crushed by secular leftist policies, I would pick Venezuela. Venezuela used to be such a prosperous country, but that all changed when they adopted socialism. Now, the country is among the poorest in the world. They are having an election this Sunday (tomorrow), and the opposition is led by a conservative superhero.

Let’s take a look at what happens when a country votes for “Democrat socialism” of the sort represented by Kamala Harris and the Democrat party.

Far-left CNN explains:

As Venezuela girds for what could be a historic presidential election this weekend, one of the most important names in the race isn’t on the ballot: María Corina Machado – the woman who galvanized Venezuela’s opposition movement, and whom many voters see as the real challenger to socialist incumbent Nicolás Maduro.

[…]On Sunday, once again, Machado will not be on the ballot – but not for lack of popularity. An avowed capitalist who has promised privatization of several state industries, Machado won more than 90% of the opposition primary vote last year, but has been barred from running for office following allegations that she didn’t include some food vouchers on her assets declaration. Machado has described the decision to bar her – upheld by Venezuela’s Supreme Court – as illegitimate, unjustified and unconstitutional.

The current opposition candidate for president, Edmundo González, is backed by Machado, who has campaigned on his behalf to mobilize voters. Experts say that their efforts may now pose the most significant threat to Maduro’s grip on power in years, as he fights to claim a third term.

As you would expect from the secular left, they plan to resort to election fraud in order to avoid losing their power. The conservatives are trying to monitor polling places to stop the fraud, but it’s challenging.

This article from Unherd explains:

Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.

So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”

Do you remember what happened in Venezuela after the socialists took power?

Venezuela’s economy ended up suffering the biggest collapse outside of wartime in the past half-century. A country with the world’s biggest oil reserves was hit by severe blackouts, hyperinflation and mass hunger as bakeries could not find flour, hospitals ran out of medicines and pro-government militia terrorised urban areas.

[…]As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum dissects in her book Autocracy, Inc, Venezuela has evolved under Chávez and Maduro into a central player in an international alliance of repressive regimes. These states assist each other with a sinister and self-serving web of kleptocratic financial systems, surveillance technologies and propaganda machines to defy sanctions, shred internal dissent and challenge democratic freedoms. So Caracas developed commercial, fiscal and political links with Beijing and Moscow while Cuban security experts helped stifle opposition and showed them how to weaponise chronic food shortages created by theft and incompetence. Few were surprised when, in March, Maduro hailed the re-election of his Russian ally Vladimir Putin as “a flawless electoral process”.

It’s very strange to me to walk around my neighborhood and not see any election signs, other than my own. We are facing the same kind of poverty and repression from our secular left fascists, and yet people are just going about their lives as normal. They’re not having conversations, they’re not posting signs, they’re not voting.

It’s so depressing to me that people don’t realize how hard it is to fix socialism once you vote it into power. Why think that the Democrat party is any different from Chavez and Maduro? They’re not. Their policies lead to the same place.