Protests in Venezuela and Bangladesh: When do Autocrats Give Up?

In one country, the increasingly autocratic leader of fifteen years has up and left after being forced out of power by a student-led opposition. In the other country, the increasingly autocratic leader of eleven years has refused to give up power in the face of protests after he rigged recent elections to give himself a narrow victory.

In the first country, Bangladesh, an interim government led by Nobel-prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus has replaced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is now in exile (once again) in India. Meanwhile in the second country, Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro has resisted calls from the United States, the European Union, and other countries to leave power (if not the country).

Why was the opposition successful in Bangladesh and not in Venezuela? There are many differences between the two countries: the institutional power of the government, the size of the respective oil reserves, the proximity to the United States. But perhaps the only difference that matters, in the end, is time. Maduro might well be just a few days, weeks, or months away from suffering the same fate as Sheikh Hasina. May he just doesn’t know it yet.

The Bangladeshi surprise

Sheikh Hasina probably thought she was untouchable. As Bangladesh’s long-serving Prime Minister, she was well-protected by her lineage – her father led the independence movement against Pakistan, became the country’s first president, and is known as the “father of the nation.” She also had reason to believe that her tenure in office was successful. The Bangladeshi economy has been on an upward trajectory for the last 15 years (including the COVID year of 2020). Access to education, children’s health, and overall life expectancy all improved during that time. The poverty rate was cut in half.

Then there was Hasina’s geopolitical acumen. She had a strong ally in the Narendra Modi government in neighboring India, and she was able to maintain relatively good relations with China as well.

Sure, there were naysayers. She put a number of these domestic critics behind bars. What she didn’t expect was a successful challenge from the country’s youth.

First of all, a huge number of Bangladeshi young people have left the country. Over 50,000 students went abroad to receive their higher education in 2023. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, over 15,000 Bangladeshi migrants, disproportionately young, made the harrowing Mediterranean crossing to Italy in 2022. “Brain drain” is a constant refrain in the Bangladeshi media, as commentators try to figure out how to retain homegrown talent.

Surely Hasina too worried about the brain drain. But every young person leaving the country was also one fewer young person available to protest government policies on the street. With an unemployment rate north of 15 percent, young Bangladeshis have understandably been frustrated at not being able to take advantage of the economic growth the country has enjoyed over the last 15 years. One option is to leave for greener pastures overseas. Another option for the well-educated is the civil service sector. Government jobs pay reasonably well and come with considerable job security.

Except that the government had been trying for years to reduce the number of slots available by allocating nearly one-third of all positions to relatives of veterans who fought in the country’s war for independence in 1971. Remember: the Prime Minister’s father was an independence fighter, and this was a way to reward that important constituency.

Students effectively blocked this new patronage system in 2018, but the government tried again this year. Young people returned to the streets. By the beginning of August 2024, dozens of people have been killed and hundreds injured as renewed anti-government protests. Although the Supreme Court significantly watered down the quota proposal, students kept up the pressure until the prime minister resigned and fled the country.

It was a result startlingly similar to what happened in Ukraine in 2014 when young people, among others, demonstrated in the center of Kyiv against a corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovich, who had also fostered a strong bond with a neighboring authoritarian leader. Yanukovich subsequently fled the scene of his crimes and decamped to Russia, in a house he bought for a reported $50 million.

Of course, no one wants to copy what happened next in Ukraine: war, loss of territory, economic devastation. To avoid Ukraine’s fate, Bangladesh will have to rely a great deal on the efforts of its new transitional government.

Fortunately, Bangladesh has put together a talented and inclusive team including Interim Prime Minister Muhammad Yunus, the economist and founder of the Grameen Bank. Yunus had been a target of the Hasina government, which accused him of embezzlement and other crimes. But the founder of the microcredit movement was guilty mostly of not getting along or going along with the Hasina administration.

Other members of the interim government include two student protest leaders, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, a remarkable achievement since young people rarely get positions of power during transitions of this sort. Other members include “human rights activists, legal experts, two ex-diplomats, a doctor and a former governor of Bangladesh’s central bank.” The main job of this refreshing assortment of non-politicians will be to stabilize the country and prepare for new elections.

The Venezuelan non-surprise

It’s not just students who are fed up with Nicolas Maduro and his kleptocratic ways. According to pre-election polls and post-election results gathered in the precincts by the opposition, upwards of 70 percent of the population wants to oust the successor to Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan non-surprise is that Maduro declared himself winner with the (to him) plausible figure of 51 percent of the vote.

There have been protests in Venezuela. As in Bangladesh, the government has sought to suppress the opposition by killing people (more than a dozen) and throwing them in jail (at least 2,000). Videos the government has released to accompany its “knock, knock” campaign of rounding up its critics have horror-movie soundtracks with lyrics like: “If you’ve done wrong, then he will come! […] He’ll look for you! You’d better hide!” The opposition called for an international day of protest on August 17 that it hoped would attract many of the roughly eight million Venezuelans living outside the country.

But here are the two main differences with Bangladesh. In Venezuela, the opposition is party-based. It is set up to run in an election, not overthrow an illegitimate government. It knows how to mobilize the population to vote, not increase the street heat. Unlike other successful opposition movements, like those in Ukraine or Serbia or the Philippines, it has not prepared a campaign of non-compliance that includes strikes, road blockades, and the like.

Second, the opposition in Venezuela is led by old people. The presidential candidate, Edmundo González, is 74 years old. The real power, however, rests with María Corina Machado, a spry 56-year-old who has been around the political block several times already. She is savvy in the ways of protest and knows the limits of opposition in Venezuela.

The young people in Bangladesh, by contrast, are neophytes. That, it turns out, was their strength. They possessed the power of ignorance. They didn’t know that their protests were quixotic. They protested and protested and continued to protest even after the Supreme Court practically threw out the hated quota system. They rallied around their one demand – Hasina out – even though they didn’t think it would actually happen.

The protests in Bangladesh were fueled by unbounded idealism. The protests in Venezuela are inspired by experienced realism. Sometimes the heart is more successful than the head.

Time’s up?

The night before Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh, her army chief decided not to implement an order to shoot at civilians in order to impose a curfew. This Bartleby-like refusal to engage – we, the Army, would prefer not to – was probably the decisive factor in bringing down the government. Meanwhile, the army remains the force behind the interim government.

But remember: it was the students’ determination that effectively forced the Bangladeshi army to switch sides. So far, there are no signs that the Venezuelan army is planning to do something similar. The opposition issued an open letter to the military, urging it to abandon Maduro. But this came only a day after the Venezuelan leader appeared in public with military officials. “Always loyal,” they chanted in unison: “Never traitors.”

The Venezuelan opposition must play this inside game even as it keeps up the street heat. Jack Nicas writes in The New York Times:

“Between 1950 and 2012, nearly two-thirds of the 473 authoritarian leaders who lost power were removed by government insiders, according to an analysis by Erica Frantz, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. To combat that threat, autocrats frequently try what political scientists call “coup-proofing”: They divide security forces into various fragmented units. That can keep any one branch from amassing too much power – and also cause forces to spy on one another. That, analysts said, describes Venezuela.”

Maduro should know that he can “coup-proof” only so much. There comes a time in the political life of nearly all autocrats when they, just like Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989, look out at what they believe to be a crowd of their supporters and, instead of receiving the applause they expect, hear only jeers. When that happens, they’d better have a helicopter waiting with a loyal pilot at the ready.

John Feffer, Institute for Policy Studies, USA <johnfeffer@gmail.com>

This article is a partnership between Global Dialogue and Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (USA).