IF VENEZUELA were a democracy, President Nicolás Maduro’s bid to win re-election would certainly fail. He leads a regime that has been in power for 19 years. Its economic policies have made life intolerable for most of the country’s 34m citizens. Food is in short supply, and nearly 90% of Venezuelans say they do not have enough money to eat properly. The contraction of the economy is the biggest in the history of Latin America. Prices are doubling nearly every month. At least a million people have left the country in the past four years.

Yet almost nobody thinks the president, who looks as well fed as ever, will lose the one-round election scheduled for May 20th. At rallies of loyalists and dragooned state workers held in barricaded streets, Mr Maduro talks of getting 12m votes, even more than Hugo Chávez, the charismatic founder of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution”, who died in 2013. To suffering voters he promises relief. “I am ready to make a change,” he said on May 11th.

The fact that few voters believe him does not matter. The “independent” electoral commission is a puppet of the regime. After regional elections last October, it refused to investigate evidence of fraud. Smartmatic, the company based in Britain that supplied Venezuela’s voting machines, has withdrawn its staff. It said that results in a vote last July for a new “constituent assembly”, whose main purpose is to circumvent the opposition-controlled legislature, had been “manipulated”.

But Mr Maduro may not have to steal the election on the day to win it. The regime has arrested the most prominent leaders of the opposition or banned them from politics. Others are in exile, leaving the opposition leaderless, divided and demoralised. Little is left of the hope and fury that animated protests against the regime last year, in which at least 163 people died.

In last year’s regional elections the government placed booths at polling stations where voters were required to renew their electronic “fatherland cards”, which entitle them to receive subsidised food. Nearly 70% of the population gets such subsidies. Mr Maduro is again suggesting that the government will exchange food for votes. “Whoever goes to vote with their fatherland card is going to get a big prize from the country, because we give and give,” he said on May 14th.

Henri the hopeful

Talks aimed at establishing conditions for a fair election between the regime and the Democratic Unity roundtable (MUD), the main opposition grouping, broke down in February. Most opposition parties then decided to boycott the vote. They have international support. The “Lima group” of 14 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Canada, has said it will not recognise the election result. Mike Pence, the United States’ vice-president, has declared the election “fake”. Even the election date, set by Mr Maduro, points to its spuriousness: his term ends in January. In countries where incumbents could lose, they do not linger in office for nearly eight months.

Mr Maduro faces enough opposition to provide the illusion of a real contest. Henri Falcón, a former ally of Chávez who then became an opposition governor of Lara, a north-western state, broke ranks with the MUD to run against the president. Another challenger is Javier Bertucci, an evangelical pastor who draws huge crowds to rallies with the offer of free soup.

A recent poll by Datanálisis suggests that Mr Falcón should win. It puts his support at 28% of registered voters. Mr Maduro and Mr Bertucci are roughly even at 17% each. Mr Falcón’s chances depend on anti-Maduro voters overcoming their sense of hopelessness to turn up at the polls. That is unlikely to happen, especially without the backing of parties in the MUD. A poll last month by Datincorp suggests that 38% of the electorate will not vote.

Boycotters say Mr Falcón is giving legitimacy to a fraudulent election and undermining international condemnation of it. He denies doing this. He says he had no hesitation in putting his name forward. “Every authoritarian, neo-dictatorial regime is fraudulent by nature, but can be defeated,” he says. “Today the conditions are in place, like never before, in favour of a political change in Venezuela.” Mr Falcón cites as a precedent the referendum called in 1988 by Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator, to extend by eight years his 15-year rule. Pinochet lost.

Mr Falcón hopes to improve his chances by exploiting divisions within the government. He has offered to govern with pragmatic members of the regime who see the need for taking steps to avert economic and humanitarian disaster.

His economic adviser, Francisco Rodríguez, a former Wall Street banker, proposes replacing the debased bolívar with the dollar to end hyperinflation and the economic slump. To work, dollarisation would have to go along with cuts to the massive budget deficits that cause inflation and with help from international bodies such as the IMF.

Mr Maduro’s proposal for dealing with hyperinflation is simpler: just knock three zeros off the bolívar. He says the new “sovereign bolívar” will replace the “strong bolívar” on June 4th.

He will probably stay president long enough to make this happen. But threats to his rule are mounting. Oil production by state-owned PDVSA, practically the only source of foreign exchange, has dropped by 30% since 2014 because of incompetent management and inadequate investment. The United States bars American investors from accepting new debt from PDVSA and the government in exchange for bonds on which they have defaulted. Bondholders are preparing to take legal action against both debtors. In April the International Chamber of Commerce awarded $2bn to ConocoPhillips, an American oil company, to compensate for the nationalisation of its operations in Venezuela in 2007. The American firm has begun to seize PDVSA’s oil stored in the Caribbean.

Cracks within the chavista government are widening. The former ambassador to the UN (and head of PDVSA) and the former attorney-general are in exile. They accuse Mr Maduro of corruption and crimes against humanity. Most of his main advisers are subject to sanctions by the United States and the European Union for drug-trafficking or undermining democracy. These could become harsher and target more people. The government has jailed some 60 officers in the army, whose support is vital to the regime’s survival. The charge, it is thought, is that they plotted against it. On May 11th the president of neighbouring Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, predicted that “a change in the regime” will happen “very soon”. That could open the way to the sort of hybrid government that Mr Falcón envisages.

Mr Maduro has surprised people who wrote him off as a bumbling heir to the clever, charismatic Hugo Chávez. His vivisection of the opposition and ruthless exercise of power have put him in position to win re-election, despite a record of governance that would destroy most presidents. But he cannot defy for ever the laws of economics or the international coalition ranged against him. His victory on May 20th may be not only fake, but fleeting.