Hope Springs Eternal
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Authoritarianism | Contra Tyrannum | Dictatorship | Hugo Chavez | Tyranny — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
And one certainly hopes that Hugo Chavez's future political prospects are as bleak as the Economist makes them out to be:
After his reverse, Mr Chávez insisted that his project had not been derailed, merely shunted into a siding "for now". That was a deliberate echo of the phrase he used after leading a failed military coup in 1992; seven years later, he was president. Maybe the country was not yet "ripe" for socialism, but "there will be no step back", he said. "You should know that I am not withdrawing a single comma of this proposal." He promised to reintroduce some bits of the reform by other means.
Nevertheless, the referendum marks a watershed. Mr Chávez "has been winged--he's passed his peak," says Teodoro Petkoff, a centrist opposition leader and newspaper editor. For the first time in nearly a decade it is possible for Venezuelans to envisage life after Mr Chávez.
The opposition victory, and the admission of defeat by the president, ought to convince radicals on both sides that the only solution to the country's bitter political polarisation is peaceful and electoral. The emergence of the "third pole", composed of Podemos, General Baduel and the student movement, should in itself herald a less polarised politics. Some talk of calling a constituent assembly to claw power back from the president. Others are looking ahead to elections for mayors and governors next year.
The referendum defeat means Mr Chávez cannot legally run again for the presidency. His aura of invincibility has gone, and the battle for the succession seems bound to begin soon. In the ruling party, political survival no longer demands unquestioning loyalty to the comandante. Fractures have already begun to appear in the supreme court and the parliament.
"This is not a 100-metre sprint, it's a marathon," cautions Mr Petkoff. But its direction is clear. "Venezuelans have woken up" is a phrase often used by supporters of Mr Chávez to describe the political mobilisation of the poor. The referendum suggests that many of them are waking up to the shortcomings of his revolution.
I don't have any doubt that Chavez will try anew to subvert Venezuelan democracy and substitute his own whims for the will of the people. But there is now a much stronger chance that he will fail in those efforts. As the story points out, Chavez's aura of invincibility is gone. That alone has been the downfall of many a politician.