Nelson Faraco

Legitimacy Is Not Government The latest episode of House of the Dragon dramatizes, without meaning to, the trap that waits on the far side of a victory. The right to govern is one thing, and governing is another. The confusion between the two is as old as power itself, and Venezuela is learning firsthand what separates them. You can arrive at the throne carrying the cleanest legitimacy the country has known in a century and discover, the next morning, that this legitimacy stops precisely at the threshold of the throne room. Inside, where governing actually happens, other things are needed that no vote hands over. And being prepared is not enough either. That is the part hardest to accept, because every serious opposition spends years preparing for the day after, drawing up stabilization plans and transition teams. All of it is necessary and none of it is government yet. You can have the best plan in the world and still not know where the keys are, because that knowledge is not inherited on paper. It stays in the hands of the one who leaves. The latest episode of House of the Dragon dramatizes that truth better than any treatise in political science. Rhaenyra Targaryen wins the war and takes the throne that belongs to her by blood, and the whole episode is the chronicle of everything that this right does not reach far enough to resolve. The coffers are empty and no one knows where the treasury went. The old adviser who ran the realm under the previous regime, whom she keeps on because she has no one to replace him with, either cannot or will not tell her. The lords who swore their loyalty look down on her to her face because she puts the priorities of the people above the entitlements they believe they were destined for. The enemy army that bent the knee did not truly surrender, it merely changed its methods, and it is already preparing its next move while it feigns submission. The queen has the crown and she has the dragons. The one thing she does not have is government. This is where the fiction stops entertaining and starts speaking about us with an uncomfortable precision. Maybe it is the trauma, but plenty of us found that, watching the episode, we could not stop seeing the parallels with the Venezuelan situation. It helps to put names to all of it. If Rhaenyra is María Corina Machado, the legitimacy that would likely reach power with more votes behind it than any leader in the country's recent history, then the usurper king who presided over the ruin and ended up fleeing is Nicolás Maduro, and the plundered realm the new queen inherits is this Venezuela of empty coffers and untouched apparatus. And there appears the piece that no amount of preparation can replace. However ready the opposition may be to govern, someone has to tell it where things are, and that someone belongs to the regime on its way out. In the series it is Alicent, the queen mother of the defeated side, the one who crosses the bridge and hands Rhaenyra what no plan contained, the one who removes from the city the most dangerous prince of her own side before he burns everything down. In the real Venezuela that figure has a name many struggle to say without anger. It is Delcy Rodríguez, and she is the only one who could say where the treasure lies buried and how the fire gets put out. Because the dangerous prince, the Aemond of this story, has his counterpart too. He is Diosdado Cabello, and containing him so he does not blow up the transition is part of the price that would have to be paid to whoever crosses the bridge.