The surprise, in a way, is less that Nicolás Maduro won “reelection” (the scare quotes are sadly mandatory here) than that he wanted another term in the first place. A former bus driver and Cuban-trained hard-line Marxist operative, Maduro has been painfully out of his depth ever since he took over the presidency following Hugo Chávez’s death in March 2013. Five years later, he has no achievements of any kind to show for his time in office, save for managing the considerable feat of hanging on to power through a crisis that would’ve seen off any leader even slightly interested in his people’s well-being.

Maduro plainly has no clue how to reverse any of the multiple crises he has set off, and is reduced to recycling the same promises he has been making and failing to keep for years now. His “campaign” this year centered on the claim that another term is all he needs to defeat the shadowy economic conspiracy he incongruously blames for hyperinflation and economic collapse. And how does he propose to do this? By doubling down on the rigid price controls and uncontrolled money printing that, economists of all stripes agree, are the actual cause of hyperinflation and economic collapse.

The total absence of credible new policies with an adamant refusal to acknowledge the scale of suffering his policies continue to cause are now the regime’s defining characteristics.

So why does he want to keep a job that’s so plainly beyond him?

The reality is that for Nicolás Maduro and the clique around him, the goal of staying in power is just to be in power. Nothing more. Because at this point he’s dug himself into a hole so deep, the alternative to a presidential palace is very likely a jail cell. Or worse.

The ghost of Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator, hangs heavily over any discussion of Maduro’s future. Like Noriega, Maduro runs a regime knee-deep in the drug trade, and one that has been the subject of intensive DEA surveillance for years. Two of the first lady’s nephews were convicted in the United States last year of offering undercover DEA agents 800 kilograms of cocaine for sale during a sting operation in Haiti some years back. Maduro’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, is designated a drug kingpin (technically a “Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker”) by the United States Treasury Department. Whatever role Maduro himself played in this trade, it’s very likely U.S. investigators have the evidence on it. That Noriega died last year while still in custody after three decades in a variety of jails on three different continents is not a fact that will have escaped Maduro.

And drugs are just the beginning. Maduro and members of his inner circle are now under international sanctions for a dizzying variety of misdeeds. Over the years, regime members have been accused of gross human-rights abuses, big-time money laundering, Olympic-level bribery and embezzlement, aiding Hezbollah, sanctions busting in Iran, large-scale environmental crimes, allegations of false imprisonment, torture—the list goes on and on. In February this year, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court announced that her office had launched a preliminary examination into human-rights abuses in Venezuela committed since 2017. Before it’s all said and done, Maduro could conceivably find himself on the dock in The Hague, Milošević-style.