Forms The Civic Ethos?

Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Was he not supposed to have been the "rightful" President of Venezuela? Oh, well, María Corina Machado has lost an election more recently, if only by proxy, so I suppose that it must be her now. She has been given the Nobel Peace Prize for wanting to privatise PDVSA, the oil and gas company. To that end, Donald Trump has already put a $50 million price on the head of President Nicolás Maduro, and with Pete Hegseth launched a campaign of mass murder. Machado has warmly welcomed these moves, openly coordinating with Trump towards her avowedly detailed plan for the first 100 hours after regime change. If she showed up in Oslo, then Maduro would never again be able to show his face among dictators.

This is not about drugs. Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, and Machado is a legaliser who, let the MAGA heartland understand, is also in favour of abortion. She is a cookie-cutter liberal Rightist who accordingly echoes Shabana Mahmood in naming Margaret Thatcher as her political heroine. She would be an Establishment Democrat in the United States, or a bog standard Labour MP in Britain. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise.

Firmly in that tradition, Machado has backed the genocide of Gaza to the hilt, she has called Trump a "visionary", she has invited both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade Venezuela in order to install her, and she joined Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Organised by Patriots.eu, that rally announced that formation's first associate member. Likud. Of course. Ties are also strengthening with the BJP. Of course. Just do not mention the burning churches from Bethlehem to Bishnupur. Not least, though not only, because of his cuts to the listed places of worship grant and his cap on repair costs, Keir Starmer would fit right in, and David Lammy would wonder why they assumed that he was there to serve the drinks. Then again, does he wonder that when Starmer does it?