Today Venezuela goes to the polls. This time it is to elect 22 governors, 328 mayors and 233 regional legislators. In the last local elections President Chávez won all but two states, although on this occasion some polls show he could lose between three and five, with races in another four states being close. Certainly if he has to surrender more than four governorships this could be regarded as a victory of sorts for the opposition, which, it must be said, is not so afflicted for once with its usual disarray. Several analysts feel Mr Chávez will lose in the big cities, possibly including Caracas, which if he did, would be a severe psychological blow considering how much he has identified with the voters in the barríos there. It is also predicted that he could lose Venezuela’s oil capital of Maracaibo.
The opposition this time around has changed its tactics; the President still has a 60% personal approval rating, although his party, the PSUV, does not enjoy anything like this level of popularity. The opposition, therefore, is avoiding attacks on the head of state, and is instead concentrating on local issues in the various regions – garbage collection, corruption, and above all else, crime, which has soared in recent years. President Chávez knows that many of his candidates are unpopular in their own areas, so while his own popularity is still strong, he has attempted to shift the focus of the debate from local concerns, and transform it into another ‘referendum’ on him personally. This may be more successful as a strategy in some places than in others, but he has certainly invested a great deal of time and energy in campaigning in those regions where he feels support for his candidates may be soft.
His language as usual has been peppered with invective; he has characterised individuals or the opposition in general as “filthy traitors,” “sell-outs,” “counter-revolutionaries,” conspirators,” “vile” and “imbeciles,” among other colourful insults. However, what is of far greater concern is that around 300 candidates, 80% of them from the opposition, have been disqualified after allegations of corruption or fraud were made against them. According to most interpretations of the Venezuelan constitution, such disqualification can occur only after due process in a court of law, but in this instance, the candidates were administratively disqualified by the Comptroller General without any court hearing. Some candidates took their case to Venezuela’s Supreme Court, arguing that the law which gives the Comptroller General such powers was unconstitutional; however, the constitutional chamber of the court ruled in favour of the Comptroller General in early August.
It was regarded as significant that among those affected was one of Venezuela’s most popular politicians, Leopoldo López, the Mayor of Chacao municipality, who was running for the post of Mayor of Caracas. It was widely expected that he would have won that mayoralty if his name had stayed on the ballot, but if recent polls are to be believed, his elimination from the race might conceivably bring little comfort to Mr Chávez, since as said above, polls suggest the race there is tight.
There have been other tactics of an equally dubious character. Wire-taps of the phones of opposition leaders have appeared in state ads to discredit them. President Chávez has made the Governor of Zulia state, Manuel Rosales, who ran against him as a presidential candidate in the 2006 election, a special target. The advertisements purport to demonstrate that he illegally took the proceeds from a state lottery, and that he may be providing financial backing for an assassination plot against the head of state. According to VHeadline News, some ads on state TV “feature recordings of… Manuel Rosales discussing campaign finance or the purchase of expensive jewellery along with slapstick sound effects and pictures of rings and a Cartier watch.” For his part, Rosales was quoted by AP as responding, “They change words, construct phrases, sentences, and later they put them on the air.” These were “montages,” he said, created by Venezuela’s Disip Secret Police and Cuba’s G2 intelligence service.
The ads have caused some critics to accuse the government of setting up a police state, but the ever laid-back editor of Tal Cual, Teodoro Petkoff, who is hardly beloved of the administration, was dismissive of this. He told VHeadline, “This is not a Cuba-style police state, we don’t live under the G2, or the Stasi or the Gestapo”; this was all about electoral politics. He believed that all the phones in his office were tapped, and had had the experience of two of his own phone conversations being played frequently on state channels. Despite all this he had a humorous take on it all: “I tell my friends in the government,” he was quoted as saying, “[that] the day I stop talking on the phone is when they should worry.”
While as Mr Petkoff maintains, the state ads may not mean that Venezuela is being transformed into a police state, they are certainly evidence that democracy in Venezuela is under pressure – and we in this society have direct experience of what that means. In addition to the telephone taps and the TV spots about Mr Rosales, Mr Chávez told his supporters that he had ordered the secret police “to keep a close eye on” the opposition governor. He was also quoted by AP as saying, “That criminal must go to prison… There’s evidence. They are not unfounded attacks.” Last week it was reported that a corruption investigation had been opened against Zulia’s governor, and the findings to date were revealed. Owing to the law with regard to term limits, Mr Rosales cannot run again for the governorship of Zulia; instead he is a candidate for the post of Mayor of Maracaibo. As indicated above, the head of state’s best efforts notwithstanding, polls suggest that he might win it. The implication is, however, that if he does, the government might try to find some grounds on which to arrest him.
This is all in addition to Mr Chávez’s threat to send tanks into the streets of places won by the opposition, and to cut off their national funding. “This is an armed revolution,” the AP quoted him as saying last week, “and the people are willing to defend the revolutionary process.” He also warned his supporters that the opposition would respond violently should his people win. For the moment, however, it is his own side which seems to have a monopoly on the violence with attacks on independent newspapers and the offices of opposition figures. President Chávez has denied that there is any government-inspired campaign at intimidation, but that has not had any effect on the actions of some of his supporters.
The stakes for the head of state in this election are extremely high. His plan is to go back to the electorate next year with a second referendum on abolishing presidential term limits, (among other things) which the electorate rejected in December 2007. If the opposition makes significant advances, it would put that second constitutional referendum in jeopardy. His problem is that Venezuela is likely to face an economic downturn next year; the price of oil has fallen to a third of what it was a few months ago, and while this will not affect his programmes for this year he will probably have to look at cut-backs next year.
He has said that his government has budgeted for a $60 a barrel oil price in 2009; however, last week oil fell below $50 a barrel. In any case, analysts are of the view that maintaining his various programmes and his overseas commitments will require an oil price at least somewhere in the eighties. His problem is compounded by the fact that non-oil sectors of the economy have been shrinking, exposing Venezuela more than ever to the vagaries of the international oil price.
Even if Mr Chávez does emerge triumphant following today’s election, he would probably have to hold a constitutional referendum earlier in the year, rather than later, before the drop in the oil price really begins to bite. It is the economic prognosis, more than anything else, which is no doubt causing the President anxiety, because if he does not prevail today, he may not have an opportunity in a hurry to hold a referendum which he could reasonably expect to win.
