Last Sunday, about 60% of the votes cast in Bolivia’s referendum were in favour of the constitutional reform being promulgated by the government of President Evo Morales. The new constitution, among other things, establishes greater rights for Bolivia’s indigenous majority and allows the president to run for re-election for one more five-year term.
Buoyed by this victory and in spite of civil strife and serious social and ethnic tensions amidst real fears of civil war, Mr Morales has promised to accelerate the implementation of the new constitution. This will enter into force in February in the face of continuing opposition in the country.
The opposition is confined mainly to the four richer, right-wing, predominantly white and mestizo, eastern provinces of the country, which are responsible for most of Bolivia’s natural gas and agricultural production. They fear a socialist revolution of sorts in which the impoverished Indian majority, empowered politically for the first time in Bolivia’s troubled history with the election of Mr Morales in 2006, seeks to redress the historical inequities of one of the continent’s poorest countries.
Mr Morales, however, is a polarising figure and seems set to push ahead with his reformist agenda without seeking some sort of negotiation with the dissident provinces. These are seeking greater autonomy in a direct challenge to the President’s intentions to place the economy under state control. Tensions are sure to rise unless there is a genuine willingness, on both sides, to talk to each other. And the threat of violence is never far away.
Mr Morales’s victory was this week hailed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who himself is holding, on February 15, his country’s second referendum on constitutional change in the space of less than a year and a half.
For Mr Chávez, the Bolivian referendum is part of a process of change in Latin America, rooted in the power of the people. Writing in a newspaper column on Tuesday, he affirmed: “This victory transcends Bolivia to be inscribed in a historic process, which the Ecuadorian president, comrade Rafael Correa, has defined as an ‘epochal change.’”
For the Venezuelan opposition, however, Mr Chávez’s proposed changes to allow for unlimited re-election for all popularly elected posts are almost tantamount to a coup d’état against the constitution. They argue that if Mr Chávez is successful, then the constitution would be nothing more than an instrument that would permit him to remain in power indefinitely and exercise ever increasing authoritarianism.
Moreover, they maintain, while the constitutional changes are being advanced under the guise of participatory democracy, supposedly allowing the people more direct involvement in the political process, they would in fact have the opposite effect. The ability of the people to make democratic choices would effectively be replaced by the will of a single man, with dire results for the democratic process.
Now, both the combined opposition and the chavistas are mobilizing for the critical vote on February 15, particularly to win over those voters who occupy the middle ground and even those supporters of Mr Chávez who might be losing faith in his ability to deliver improvements to their quality of life. Indeed, it is this second group that might prove critical to the outcome of the referendum, for even if they do not vote against Mr Chávez, they might simply abstain.
In the 2007 referendum, abstentions hurt Mr Chávez. Now, some experts are calculating that there could be almost two million floating votes. Unsurprisingly, since the local government elections last November, the chavistas have been pulling out all the stops to recoup lost ground.
What may be critical in the forthcoming poll is that there is a significant body of voters who have not yet moved from a position of neutrality to voting for a different alternative, simply because there is no clear alternative. The opposition has been successful in promoting resistance to Mr Chávez, but it still has a lot to do to present to the populace a political strategy that goes beyond opposing, to offering a credible governance alternative to that being proposed by the Venezuelan president.
In both Bolivia and Venezuela, it is clear that constitutional reform is something that has to be decided by the people. The result in Bolivia and the continuing tension there makes it clear that, whatever happens in Venezuela, in two weeks’ time, a vote alone is not sufficient to define a democracy.
In any democratic process, it behoves the winners to ensure that a social contract is forged, so that no group feels marginalized or excluded. Moreover, there should be a necessary separation of powers, with the requisite checks and balances, allowing for a broad approach to governance to guarantee genuine, consensus-based democracy. Power cannot and should not be concentrated in the hands of a single person or one group alone.