After twenty years fighting Chavism, the opposition has not been able to present to the nation an alternative country project. The opposition has obsessively engaged in a struggle to get out of the Chavista regime without explaining to the country what it would do after reaching that goal. Faced with the well-defined Chavez project to implement the 21st Century Socialism or Communal State in Venezuela, the opposition barely has stammered a pseudo-country project that would simply consist of "putting the 1999 Constitution into practice".
Every Constitution, National, regardless of whether it can reflect a conception of society, and basically presupposes a certain country project, is presented simply in the form of a numbered list of articles of law. The spirit and purpose of a National Constitution is something that can only be understood from a philosophical point of view, and this only by those who have the required intellectual training. Therefore, for practical purposes, it will be difficult for a Constitution to serve as a guide for a nation, if it is not accompanied by an explicit and clear long-term national program, that is, a Country Project.
What is the project or country projects of the current opposition groups? To reintroduce the economic, social and political paradigms of the IV Republic? To found a new Republic other than the IV and the V Republics? And in this last case, what would be the programmatic guidelines of that new Republic? Answering these questions is crucial for the future of Venezuela. However, at this point (note that the so-called V Republic has been 20 years of existence), the issue has never been addressed and much less has been part of the discourse of the opposition groups.
It is likely that one of the determining causes of the skepticism that the opposition cause has maintained a large part of the Venezuelan people over the past two decades (grouped under the term of the so-called "Niní"), has been precisely this absence of depth or teleology of the opposition discourse. I therefore urge the various opposition groups to reflect on the issue. We hope that these projects, besides reflecting the immediate aspirations of Venezuelan society, take into account, above all, the realities foreseen in our country and on the planet for the next decades of the 21st century.
We are aware, however, that the Venezuelans of the present rentier era, marked by frivolity and immediacy, are not very inclined to look at the horizon and to reflect on the future. However, the intellectual exercise that we are proposing would add seriousness to the work of Venezuelan politicians and to politics in general in our country. A sustained national debate on the issue could also serve as a preamble to the electoral campaign that will be held once Chavismo has left power and the V Republic has gone down in history.
