Movement to Socialism (Venezuela)

Movimiento al Socialismo (known by its acronym; MAS) is a Venezuelan political party of democratic socialist ideology, which was born as a product of serious criticism of the model soviet socialist. Many of its former members formed an important sector of the national leadership of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), led by Pompeyo Márquez, Teodoro Petkoff, Eloy Torres, Freddy Muñoz, Argelia Laya, Fidel Ernesto Vásquez and Luis Manuel Esculpi. On January 19, 1971, the first National Convention was held at the Club for the Blind in Caracas; formally establishing itself.

The founders of the party tried to make a difference with its hard line by abandoning Marxism, after the armed confrontations that took place during the first years of the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the PCV itself and other left-wing organizations against the governments of the Puntofijo Pact of Democratic Action (AD) and COPEI and had left them politically isolated, being persecuted and outlawed. Within the leftist groups of the armed struggle, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) merged into the MAS in 1983. Currently the most notorious leaders are Felipe Mujica, Segundo Meléndez and María Verdeal.

In 2008, along with other parties, he founded the opposition coalition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), from which he separated in 2013. He is currently part of the opposition platform of former presidential candidate Henri Falcón, Concertación por el Cambio.

Political ideology

The Movement Towards Socialism defines itself as a socialist but not a Marxist political party that was born through serious criticism of Soviet socialism and other socialist models, among those criticisms were the bureaucratization of power, authoritarianism, social imperialism, the absence of democracy, total control of the media and the permanence of the social relations of capitalist production. So the MAS took a democratic, pluralist, decentralized and non-dogmatic socialist doctrine, based on self-management and co-management of the media of production for the construction of socialism, promoting the political participation of the population, recognizing the market as an efficient mechanism for resource allocation but that the State must correct social distortions created by it and likewise the MAS gives importance to the private sector for the development of the economy but under a co-management system.

Trajectory during the 20th century

The first congress of the MAS was held on January 14, 1971. At that congress, Alfredo Maneiro and others (who had also participated in the division of the PCV that gave rise to the MAS) decided not to participate in the founding of the new party and they withdrew to later found La Causa R. He participated for the first time in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1973. On this occasion, the MAS nominated José Vicente Rangel with the support of the MIR, finishing fourth with 4.26% of the votes., 3.70% specifically for the MAS.

A year earlier, in 1972, Venezuela awarded the writer Gabriel García Márquez the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez, who maintained a close friendship with Teodoro Petkoff whom he admired for his work on Czechoslovakia (this work strongly criticized Soviet imperialism), gave the US$25,000 prize to the party for his electoral campaign. Márquez would later call himself the first international masista.

The MAS has always claimed to be the third political force in the country but in all the elections it did not exceed 5% of the votes until the 1993 elections, in the presidential elections held in 1978 the MAS again nominated Rangel who collected 4.70% of the ballots for the party, remaining in third position, in the 1983 elections the organization withdrew its support for Rangel (who ran for other leftist groups such as the People's Electoral Movement, MEP; or the PCV) and assigned Teodoro Petkoff as a candidate with the merger of the MIR, using the same card called "MAS-MIR", obtaining 3.35% of the votes for the party, being in third place once more, the same as the 1988 elections, but in this campaign he collected a lower percentage of votes, only 2.71%, always in all the elections of the 1970s and 1980s, the results placed him very far from the candidates of Democratic Action (AD) and Copei.

In 1985 Freddy Muñoz was elected Secretary General and Argelia Laya President. In 1986 they were re-elected until 1994. In 1989 the MAS won the governorship of Aragua and in the following elections the governorships of Sucre, Portuguesa and Zulia. In the 1993 presidential elections, the MAS supported Rafael Caldera, a decision that had the support of Pompeyo Márquez, Teodoro Petkoff, Freddy Muñoz, Luis Manuel Esculpi and Moisés Moleiro, even though the possibility of supporting Andrés Velásquez's option of The Radical Cause that, with the support of the MAS, would have won the elections). Former President Rafael Caldera, was elected President of the Republic, in a coalition made up of various groups from the left (the MEP and PCV), center-left (URD, and center-right such as the MIN) popularly called "el Chiripero", the MAS specifically obtained the 10% of the votes of that partisan alliance.

In 1994, the MAS held primary elections to elect its new authorities, with Gustavo Márquez being elected president and Enrique Ochoa Antich, who was a single-member deputy for Caracas, secretary general. However, Ochoa's theses (liberal socialism, including withdrawing support from the Caldera government, in order to form an electoral alliance with La Causa R in the future and create an Ethics Commission to combat internal corruption) were rejected by the party leadership, for which Ochoa Antich resigned from the party in 1997. During Caldera's period, for the first time, party members formed an executive cabinet, assigning various ministries to several of its leaders, including Pompeyo Márque, Teodoro Petkoff and Simón Garcia. However, despite the tensions, the MAS does not withdraw its support for Caldera.

In 1997 the primary elections were held to choose the new authorities of the organization and Felipe Mujica was elected as president and Leopoldo Puchi as General secretaries. In the 1998 elections, the MAS made an electoral alliance with the V Republic Movement and supported the candidacy of Hugo Chávez, a decision that Petkoff did not share, which is why he left the party and other dissidents led by Pompeyo Márquez and Luis Manuel Esculpi. they also drop out to form the Democratic Left party, opposed to Chávez.

Chávez, who was also basically supported by some organizations that initially supported Caldera's previous government, such as the MEP, the PCV, as well as the new Patria Para Todos (PPT) party, which splintered from La Causa Radical, forming the Polo Patriotic electoral platform, Chávez won with more than 56% of votes, the MAS obtained 9% for its card, with which, if it had not counted, it would not have been able to win.

Decentralization

In 1989, when the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez decided to open up a decentralization policy, allowing citizens to directly elect state governors and mayors of the country's municipalities by popular vote, the MAS obtained very prominent representation in the state of Aragua obtaining the victory for the governorship, first with Carlos Tablante and later with Didalco Bolívar being considered the fief state of the party, managing to obtain the mayoralties of several Aragonese municipalities, the MAS was able to obtain for some periods of the decade From 1990 the governorship of the Lara states with Orlando Fernández Medina, in the Sucre state with Ramón Martínez Abdenour, Amazonas, Portuguesa, Delta Amacuro, he also obtained the governorship of the Zulia state with Lolita Aniyar de Castro, from 1993 to 1996.

In the 21st century

In the early presidential elections of the year 2000, the MAS once again supported Chávez for his re-election, winning with 59.76%, with 8.70% for the MAS. Despite this, the MAS in 2002 decided to withdraw support from Chávez mainly for "authoritarianism" and it cracked when the party divided into supporters of continuing to support Chávez and what they passed to the opposition (what the majority adopted) In the end, new split parties from the MAS were born, the Izquierda Unida group led by Félix Jesús Velásquez and Efrén Calderón, and the Podemos party led by Didalco Bolívar and Ismael García, loyal to Chávez until 2007; The Vamos party in turn emerged from the latter, led by Rafael Simón Jiménez, who adopted an ambiguous policy while in government and in opposition, to later turn against the government and finally dissolved, leaving its leaders to form new parties of recently created as the Polo Democrático (in turn dissolved to integrate the Un Nuevo Tiempo party) in which there were former leaders of Acción Democrática and years later parties emerged as a result of the division of Podemos and the PPT movement as Avanzada Progresista and Movimiento Venezuelan Progressive.

Since then, the MAS was led by the group made up of Felipe Mujica, Carlos Tablante and Leopoldo Puchi, now becoming staunch detractors of the Chávez government, the MAS grouped in a coalition with the other opposition parties to put pressure on the the resignation of the Chávez government that also failed, the so-called Democratic Coordination that was definitively dissolved in 2004 shortly after Chávez won the recall referendum, promoted by it.

March of the MAS and Copei in support of Manuel Rosales for his presidential candidacy.

In 2005 some leaders of the MAS (located in the opposition) have declared their intention to return to the Chávez government, but it was not accepted, in the parliamentary elections of that year, unlike other sectors of the opposition, the MAS participated but it did not win any seats. In 2006, the MAS decided to support Manuel Rosales as the candidate of a good part of the opposition parties to the presidential elections on December 3, obtaining 71,600 votes (0.61%), the lowest percentage registered in a national election for this party, motivated in part because its split from the Podemos party captured part of the traditional MAS vote. At the beginning of 2007, some of its important leaders, among which Tablante and Julio Montoya stand out, decided to join the party of Manuel Rosales Un Nuevo Tiempo.

In the internal elections of 2007, 41 leaders were elected to integrate the Executive Committee, thus eliminating the figure of the president and general secretary of the party, the last to occupy these positions were Felipe Mujica and Leopoldo Puchi respectively. In addition, 150 delegates were chosen for the National Convention.

For the first time since its foundation, the MAS had to collect signatures in order to maintain its legal validity in the National Electoral Council for not obtaining 1% of the votes in the last elections, which is the minimum required by the Venezuelan electoral law. In November 2007, it presented itself as one of the parties to promote the No option to reject the 2007 Constitutional Reform Project in Venezuela.

In 2008 the political party Podemos reconciled with the MAS party, and they entered into negotiations for a possible reunification, extending the invitation to other parties of the anti-Chavista left such as La Causa Radical and Bandera Roja. However, the Podemos party would return to support Chavismo and would form part of the official Gran Polo Patriotico coalition.

For the 2012 presidential elections, the MAS decided to support the candidacy of Henrique Capriles Radonski, acting under the card of the Democratic Unity Roundtable. In this election, Hugo Chávez Frías is re-elected.

In the 2012 regional election, the MAS decided to support the candidacies for governors of the Democratic Unity Table (MUD) but under its own card. The MUD would only achieve victory in three governorships.

After the death of Hugo Chávez in March 2013, the MAS decided to once again support the candidacy of Henrique Capriles Radonski for the presidential election in April of that year under the single card of the Democratic Unity Roundtable. This card obtained 7,363,980 votes, that is, 49.12%; while the candidate of the official coalition, Nicolás Maduro obtained 7,587,579, that is, 50.61%.

In August 2013, he decided to launch his own card for the municipal elections of that year, denouncing its president Felipe Mujica that sectors of the opposition seek a "polarization scheme" of the unitary card that the MAS had previously proposed for other elections and also denouncing the "mistreatment" of the MAS by the MUD. Later in the municipal elections of December 2013, the MAS decided to support as many of its own candidates as those of the MUD, and obtained 115,000 votes at the national level, above parties such as Patria Para Todos, Por la Democracia Social and the Electoral Movement of the People. Two candidates for mayor for the MAS are elected: Alcides Martínez in the Santos Michelena de Aragua municipality and Marcos Montilla in the San Rafael de Carvajal municipality of Trujillo.

On January 19, 2015, Felipe Mujica clarified that the MAS will not return to the MUD because he considers that the coalition "makes the mistake of wanting to polarize the country". the MUD in the regional elections of 2017. In the 2021 elections, it supported some candidacies of the Unitary Platform and the Democratic Alliance, in addition to supporting some independent candidacies and one of the Popular Revolutionary Alternative.

Electoral Summary of the MAS

Presidential

Women Parliamentarians

Year	# Of vows	% of votes	Deputies	+/-	Senators	+/-
1973	232 756	5.3 %	9/200	New	2/47	New
1978	325 328	6.2%	11/199	2	2/44
1983	377 795	5.7 %	11/200	1	2/44
1988	733 421	10.2 %	18/201	7	3/46	1
1993	526 197	10.9 %	24/203	6	5/50	2
1998	465 977	9.1 %	24/207		5/54
2000	224 170	5,03 %	6/165	18
2005	9118	0.3 %	0/167	6
2010	67 357	0.4%	0/165	0
2015	37,405	0.27%	0/167	0
2020	77,311	1.23%	0/277	0

Regionals

Year	# Of vows	% of votes	Government obtained	+/-
1989	706 893	17.78 %	1/20
1992	No data		3/22	2
1995	471 614	10.48 %	4/22	1
1998	516 918	10.42 %	2/23	2
2000	No data		4/23	2
2004			0/22	4
2008	44 731	0.4 %	0/22
2010	No data		0/2
2012	131 559	1.5 %	0/23
2017	No data		0/23
2021	143 714	1.6 %	0/23