VENEZUELA: Chavez Issues Ultimatum for Joining Unified Party

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Mar 28 2007 (IPS) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez issued a graphic warning to political sectors that have supported him for 10 years, but have been reluctant to join his new United Socialist Party (PSUV), saying: “They’ll all fit in a Volkswagen.”

“I know what’s going to happen, and I’ll lend them my little red car (a red Volkswagen beetle given to him by the defence minister) so that they can go for a ride. They’ll all fit,” he said on Tuesday, as he once again called publicly for a single unified ruling party.

Confident of his personal charismatic hold on his grassroots supporters without the mediation of political parties, the president has challenged those who still hold themselves aloof, saying: “If you want to leave, do so, but don’t complain afterwards,” or “Your votes are not your own, they belong to Chávez, they belong to the people.”

The groups that are holding out are the Podemos party, made up of leftist social democrats, which governs three of the country’s 24 states; Patria para Todos (PPT), a workers’ party which governs two states; and the orthodox Communist Party (PCV), founded in 1931.

“It’s a practical problem. How do you dissolve a party to join another one that doesn’t even exist yet? In the PCV, we believe in a single party of the revolution, but all the parties are at different stages of readiness. It can’t be solved from one minute to the next,” said Oscar Figuera, the secretary general of the PCV.

Last weekend Chávez presided at the swearing-in of 2,400 PSUV “propulsores” (activists), the first group out of 70,000 activists who will select the future members of the PSUV, which plans to hold its founding congress in mid-August.

“I’m going to work hard for people at the grassroots, because I’m going to call on all the people to form one single revolutionary party. It will unite groups, commands and small commands in one large, highly-disciplined structure, as if it were a great army,” Chávez said.

The president, a retired military officer, launched a campaign for “deepening the revolution, heading for 21st-century socialism” in January, at the start of his new six-year term of office. His brand of socialism still lacks a written programme, but will be spearheaded by constitutional and legal reforms and new organisations, including the PSUV.

The Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), a party that Chávez created in 1997, and several small radical groups agreed to dissolve as soon as the president called for the formation of the PSUV last December. But the PCV, PPT and Podemos referred the decision to party congresses or assemblies once the outlines of the new party were laid down.

Ismael García, the secretary general of Podemos, told a party rally that “we are united by the president’s leadership, but we do not and will not share the idea of a single way of thinking, because ‘Chavismo’ is a plural movement.” The president deplored this position, which he saw as “using the same arguments as the political right.”

“We are willing to join the unified party, but we don’t agree that the ‘propulsores’ should just be handpicked. We think they should be elected by the people, and the whole process should be supervised by the (state) National Electoral Council,” García told IPS last week, before withdrawing into silence to avoid further clashes with the president.

José Albornoz, the head of the PPT, said in early March that “the debate should dig deeper, and no one be stigmatised for thinking differently.” But he added, “I’m not going to argue with the president, because you don’t answer back to a father.”

More recently, Albornoz announced that his party would hold a general assembly bringing together 350 national leaders on Apr. 10, to decide the direction it should take. He predicted that “whatever the final decision, there will be a split and some members will leave the PPT ranks.”

While the three parties float in political limbo, neither accepting nor rejecting Chávez’s proposal, many of their regional leaders have already deserted. Two governors and several mayors belonging to the PPT and Podemos resigned from their parties to join the PSUV.

Parliamentary deputies are following suit, as at least five of the 18 Podemos representatives have joined the PSUV. The PPT still retains its 11 deputies in the legislature while it wavers. All 167 members of parliament are pro-government, since the opposition boycotted the parliamentary elections in 2005, on claims of fraud that were never substantiated.

The PCV is more disciplined, although it is an open secret that there is division between those who want to join the PSUV and those who want to maintain the old party. Chávez’s united socialists will not be Marxist-Leninist but will follow the president’s creed, which he has defined, at one and the same time, as socialist, Bolivarian, Christian and in favour of indigenous rights.

Chávez was reelected in December with 7.3 million votes, of which 4.8 million were for the MVR, 760,000 for Podemos, 600,000 for the PPT and 340,000 for the PCV. The other 800,000 votes were contributed by a dozen smaller groupings, most of which have already stated their willingness to join the PSUV.

It remains to be seen whether a new opposition will arise from within present-day Chavismo. Political scientist Alberto Garrido told IPS that Podemos could rely on a regional power base in the industrial state of Aragua, west of Caracas.

Rifts will probably occur when “a large proportion of the country, including Chavistas, find themselves disagreeing with the implantation of a form of socialism,” head of the Hinterlaces polling firm Oscar Schémel told IPS.

Chávez was reelected with 63 percent of the vote, compared to 37 percent for his centrist opponent Manuel Rosales. However, a Hinterlaces poll this month indicated that 45 percent of interviewees were against socialism, 22 percent did not know or did not answer, and 33 percent were in favour.

“But most of the 33 percent in favour associated the idea of socialism with social programmes. Eighty-six percent of the interviewees were against the implantation of Cuban-style socialism, and 78 percent disapproved of rude or abusive confrontation with the United States,” Schémel said.

Opposition leader Teodoro Petkoff, editor of the newspaper Tal Cual, said it was “a crass error to view the united party’s fortunes as if it had nothing to do with us, because behind the tug-of-war between Chávez and Podemos-PPT-PCV an entire concept of society, politics, and life itself is at stake.”

Chávez “would like to organise his party along purely military lines, because no one questions orders in the barracks, and he wants not only a party but a whole country to be submissive, obsequious, fearful and flattering to him,” said Petkoff, who was a communist for 20 years until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

General Alberto Muller, who in retirement was a party leader in the PPT, was recalled to active service by Chávez at the age of 70 and is participating in bringing the PSUV to birth. He said that the new party “won’t only be for elections, or to support a particular government, but to draw up a blueprint for the country we want, because it is an essential stage on the road to 21st century socialism.”