Democratic Unity Roundtable

The Democratic Unity Roundtable (Spanish: Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, shortened MUD or Unidad) is a broad, big-tent alliance of oppositionists to the Venezuelan Maduro government. In contrary to portrayals in mass media, the MUD is a social democracy party and consists mostly of liberals who would e.g. like to legalize abortion and same-sex civil unions, thus being more socially leftist than the Maduro government. However many of the parties included have contradictory views to each other they all share the same distrust of Maduro's authoritarian regime. Out of the 16 parties represented in MUD, only four are right-of-center, and the four largest parties are center-left. This is due to the fact that in Latin America, Christian Democratic parties tend to be centre-left compared to the rest of the world where they are center-right to right-wing. In the Venezuelan parliament, altogether only 4 of 109 MUD MPs are right-of-center. Economically more MUD parties are conservative, but the majority of them is also on the left. Most MUD parties are members of the Socialist International such as the Acción Democrática, Un Nuevo Tiempo, and Voluntad Popular.

The MUD is currently struggling to rein in their supporters in the ever-growing Crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela as they react to the brutality of the Maduro regime and its drug lord backers.