Sunday's election may determine whether Venezuela starts to resemble Castro's Cuba
Venezuela’s voters go to the polls Sunday to elect 22 provincial governors, 328 mayors and 233 regional legislators. The vast majority of these posts in the hands of politicians loyal to President Hugo Chávez, in part because the opposition boycotted the regional elections last time around.
So the polls will certainly boost the relative strength of the opposition – Chávez may lose up to a third of the provinces – even though the regime has banned prominent critics from participating. Amid widespread popular discontent with rising crime rates, deteriorating public transport, power cuts and inflation at over 30%, the government is raising the stakes.
“If I am to continue governing Venezuela, it will depend on what happens on Sunday. Make no mistake, Chávez’s political destiny is in play here,” the president told a recent rally. The results will determine whether Chávez has sufficient political capital to revive constitutional reform proposals, rejected in a plebiscite last year, to allow him to run in the 2012 presidential election.
“Both Chávez and the opposition have turned these elections into a plebiscite on the president’s rule,” said Edgardo Lander, of the Central University of Venezuela. “A significant advance by the opposition could force Chávez to rethink his strategy [of eliminating presidential term limits],” he added.
Some observers suggest the elections could be a watershed, although an openly pluralistic liberal democracy appears unlikely in the short term. “Will it go the way of Cuba, which has exhibited anemic industrial capacity and recently took steps to open up parts of its controlled economy? Or will it be similar to China, whose economy has demonstrated tremendous growth since the 1990s?,” one analyst asks. “Either way, Venezuela appears increasingly similar to these countries in its restriction of personal liberty and expression, as well as other rights such as private property ownership.”
It has also been suggested that serious losses could prompt the regime to establish parallel structures of power to continue the transition to “21st century socialism”. “Chavez is autocratic and doesn’t want to share power,” said Milos Alcalay, Venezuela’s former U.N. ambassador. “He’s already said he will try to put new structures above and below opposition governors.”
Venezuela is the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter, with the fourth highest proven oil reserves. But the global financial crisis and sharp decline in oil prices have prompted Chávez to call for “austerity” in the 2009 budget.
The government’s economic dirigisme, mismanagement of PDVSA, the state-owned petroleum company, and profligacy with the country’s oil revenues are all catching up with the regime, a Caracas-based analysis suggests: “PDVSA has been suffering from under-investment in its core business for some years, as windfall profits from rising oil prices are deployed in domestic social programmes and to support international political ambitions. ”
As geopolitical analyst John R. Thomson observes after a recent trip to Caracas:
Showpiece foreign projects, including refineries in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Paraguay, are being stretched out, embarrassing recipient despots like Daniel Ortega. Years of foreign ventures have drained funds needed for Venezuela’s development, yet another factor favoring major opposition electoral advances on November 23.
Equally important, Chávez will be hard-pressed to continue underwriting foreign elections. In the first proven incident, bagman Guido Antonini broke with the Chávez regime after being apprehended smuggling $800,000 into Buenos Aires, part of a $5 million cash shipment from Caracas in support of last year’s Argentine presidential elections.
He quotes newspaper editor, ex-leftist guerrilla, and former minister Teodoro Petkoff estimating hardcore Chávista support at 20 percent: “He peaked when he was reelected in 2006 and has been declining slowly but steadily since,” he says. “The reasons are multiple, but a major one is that the Chávistas indulge in obscene, obvious consumption, while little gets done for the people. No schools, little or nothing on shop shelves, huge military expenditures – he has dreams of the re-emergence of the Soviet Union!”
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