On December 6, 2015, Venezuela's United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) received 5.6 million votes for the National Assembly. The opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), received 7.7 million. The arithmetic was brutal. The PSUV, the political vehicle of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, lost its majority for the first time in sixteen years. The opposition secured 112 of 167 seats, a two-thirds supermajority that theoretically granted it significant constitutional power.
The election was a direct referendum on scarcity. Venezuela, despite holding the world's largest oil reserves, was experiencing hyperinflation, empty supermarket shelves, and rampant crime. Citizens waited in lines for hours to buy basic goods. The ballot became a mechanism for expressing hunger. The result was not a narrow rejection but a rout. Even in traditional Chavista strongholds, the party's support eroded.
This political shift proved largely illusory. The outgoing PSUV-dominated legislature quickly appointed loyalist judges to the Supreme Tribunal of Justice. That court then systematically nullified every consequential law passed by the new opposition majority. The National Assembly was rendered impotent. The institutional architecture of Chavismo, built over a decade and a half, absorbed the shock of an electoral defeat and neutralized it.
The 2015 vote exposed the limits of electoral change within an entrenched authoritarian system. It demonstrated that a government could acknowledge a loss at the polls while dismantling the authority of the winning body. The supermajority, a symbol of overwhelming public mandate, became a monument to political futility. The economic crisis deepened, and Venezuela's democratic erosion accelerated.