CARACAS, (Reuters) – Venezuelans vote for state governors tomorrow in an election that will decide if the opposition stays united behind youthful leader Henrique Capriles amid signs that President Hugo Chavez’s cancer could force him to step down.
Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, lost to Chavez in the October presidential election but won 45 percent of the vote and is seen as the most likely candidate if Chavez is unable to stay in power and a new election is called.
Before that, however, he must defeat a challenge from a heavyweight Chavez protege in Miranda, the country’s second-most populous state, to maintain his support among often-quarreling opposition parties.
Defeat for Capriles could prompt several opposition leaders to push their own claims to be the national opposition nominee at the next election. Any new fractures in the opposition would weaken its chances of victory.
“There are no automatic candidacies,” cautioned Pedro Benitez of Democratic Action, one of the 20 or so politically diverse groups that make up the opposition coalition.
The opposition has seven of the country’s 23 state governorships and is hoping to at least retain those on Sunday.
Campaigning has been completely overshadowed by Chavez’s cancer operation in Cuba on Tuesday, his fourth in the last 18 months.
Officials have given grave assessments of the 58-year-old socialist leader’s condition following the complex six-hour surgery. On Thursday they said doctors had to use “corrective measures” to stop unexpected bleeding that was a result of the procedure, but that his condition had since improved.
The overall showing of the opposition tomorrow will be an important indicator of its capacity to mobilize voters just two months after Capriles, a wiry and sports-loving lawyer by profession, was beaten by Chavez in October.
The headline race is in Miranda, where the government is trying to oust Capriles from the governor’s office by backing Elias Jaua, a well-funded former vice president who was once a stone-throwing student radical.
“We are committed to making Chavez happy by showing him that Miranda was liberated from fascism and is being run by a socialist, by his son, which is what I am,” Jaua told a rally.
If Capriles were to lose, local analysts say, it would be very unlikely that he would represent the opposition in a new presidential election.
CHAVEZ ABSENT
Campaign events by the candidates of the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) this week have turned into tearful vigils with supporters praying that Chavez recovers and can begin his new term on Jan. 10.
If Chavez has to step down, a new presidential election must be held within 30 days. He has named his vice president and foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, as heir apparent in case he died or his illness forced him to give up office.
Other high-profile gubernatorial races tomorrow include the one in Aragua, where Chavez’s former Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami is trying to win back the state for the PSUV. He was campaigning alongside Maduro on Thursday.
The vice president led the emotional crowd in a chant of “With Chavez and Tareck, we will win again!”
While the PSUV has displayed its powerful electoral machinery time after time over the years, the distressing news coming out of Havana has transfixed many distraught local party activists, perhaps taking the edge off its efficiency.
The fact the elections take place in mid-December could count against the opposition, many of whose middle-class supporters will have taken advantage of school holidays to travel abroad or within Venezuela for Christmas.