VENEZUELA: New Stage of Political Confrontation, with Monochrome Parliament

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 5 2005 (IPS) - The unprecedented 100 percent victory by the ruling coalition in Sunday’s legislative elections in Venezuela opens the door to a new stage in the political confrontation that has marked President Hugo Chávez’s seven years in office.

The five opposition parties that had a chance of winning seats in the single-chamber Congress pulled out of the elections last week and announced that they would fight Chávez from outside of the legislature, although they have presented no concrete alternatives or proposals.

The opposition, which has been trying for years to oust the leftist Chávez by various means, including a short-lived coup d’etat in April 2002, is now demanding an overhaul of the country’s electoral authority in order to participate in the December 2006 presidential elections.

Control over the 167 seats in an expanded Congress by Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement and its allies will make it easier to pass the new laws with which the president wants to implement his own brand of “21st century socialism”, a vague concept that includes government support for cooperatives, greater state control over the private economy, and the channeling of windfall oil revenues into a wide range of social programmes for the poor.

Since next year is a presidential election year and because some grassroots supporters of the president have complained of the government’s inefficiency and red tape, “Chávez will have to pay much more attention to internal questions,” political scientist Alberto Garrido, who has written a number of books on recent political events in Venezuela, told IPS.

On the international front, “Chávez’s natural adversaries, starting with the United States, are going to try to undermine his legitimacy, but other countries that do business with Venezuela will stick to formalities and will accept the results of the elections,” said Garrido.

Turnout on Sunday stood at around 25 percent of the country’s 14.4 million registered voters, according to the National Electoral Council, although opposition leaders like social democrat Henry Ramos say it was under 20 percent.

In previous legislative elections, turnout has hovered around 40 percent, and opinion polls predicted that it would be between 30 and 45 percent this time around, even before the opposition withdrew on the grounds that the country’s electoral authorities were biased in favour of Chávez and unable to guarantee the secrecy of the vote.

The parties pulled out despite the decision by the National Electoral Council not to use controversial fingerprint machines, employed in previous polls to prevent multiple voting, on Sunday.

Prior to the opposition parties’ announcement that they would boycott the elections, polls showed that they were likely to get trounced by Chávez’s party and its allies.

The opposition attempted to capitalise on images of a mere trickle of voters at the polling stations and the high abstention levels. “The people spoke out with their silence,” said Julio Borges, leader of the new right-wing party Justice First, while the opposition electoral group Súmate said that “by behaving the way they did, the people voted that the Electoral Council should resign.”

“Today there is less democracy in Venezuela.,” said the head of Súmate, María Corina Machado, who was received by U.S. President George W. Bush in the White House six months ago. A parliament “wounded by illegitimacy has been born,” she maintained.

According to Chávez and his supporters, Súmate – which has received financing from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn receives funds from the U.S. Congress – forms part of a plan by Washington to intervene in Venezuela, and convinced the traditional opposition parties to join in its plans.

Chávez accused the Bush administration of being behind the opposition boycott of the elections.

After he cast his vote on Sunday, the president called for a new opposition to emerge, and praised the small opposition groups and individuals who took part in the elections, while stating that perhaps the old opposition parties “deep down are hastening their own death.”

Anti-Chávez analysts like Carlos Raúl Hernández complained that “this is the only opposition movement in the world that wants to defend democracy and fight authoritarianism by urging people not to vote.”

Garrido said “the opposition parties should take a different stance, I’m not yet sure what that would be, because so far they have been basically parliamentary parties (holding 79 of the 165 seats in the outgoing parliament) and in each situation, although they were formally in the opposition, they legitimated Chávez’s growth in practice.”

Ramos, whose Democratic Action party governed Venezuela seven times between 1945 and 1993, urged the opposition “to build an all-inclusive alternative proposal, which can draw in the broad popular sectors that are discontented with the government, and isn’t limited to just one social class.”

The middle- and upper-class sectors of Venezuelan society are the stronghold of the opposition to Chávez, whose support base is largely made up of the working class and the poor.

“But that reality has changed, and people are more critical now, and since the (August 2004 presidential recall) referendum there are many who neither support the government nor the opposition,” Oscar Schémel, with the Hinterlaces polling firm, told IPS.

Nevertheless, the most recent polls on Chávez’s popularity show that he has nearly 70 percent approval ratings.

In August 2004, Chávez was supported by 59 percent of voters who came out for the referendum organised by the opposition. Since then, the opposition’s influence has steadily declined.

Less than four million voters took part in the elections Sunday, and tens of thousands of ballots were annulled because they were cast in favour of candidates from one of the opposition parties that had pulled out of the race.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Republic Movement and its allies won in every voting district, with 90 percent of the valid votes in some cases.

For Antonio Gil, with the opposition-aligned polling firm Datanálisis, Sunday’s low voter turnout and the result – a monochrome legislature – “could signify something very touchy – the perception that there is no dialogue and that it’s not worth competing politically, because the power of one of the sides is so great.”

Vice President José Vicente Rangel urged the opposition Sunday “to rejoin the route of dialogue,” and offered “to sit down with all Venezuelans to discuss” the situation.

Nicolás Maduro, the head of parliament, said Monday that the legislature “will work and consult with everyone, regardless of the political party to which they belong.”

The elections were monitored by 400 international observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS), the European Union and other Latin American countries, who will issue their reports over the next few days.

Prior to Sunday’s vote, the OAS had stated that the conditions were in place for fair, transparent elections.