John Uskglass
Venerable Relic of the Wastes
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaySto...tory_id=3102178
Allenede II: The Gayening.
Quickly, somone catch the Wing Commander referance!
Allenede II: The Gayening.
Quickly, somone catch the Wing Commander referance!
AFTER years of mounting economic misery and violent unrest, Venezuelans were given a historic opportunity on Sunday August 15th to vote in a “recall” referendum on whether to keep or to kick out their populist president, Hugo Chávez. They turned out in droves, queuing for hours in the hot sun to cast their votes. Partly because of the huge turnout and partly because of glitches in a new, electronic voting system, the National Electoral Council (CNE) twice had to extend voting hours; and only at midnight did polling stations finally close. Before daybreak on Monday, the CNE said that, with counting almost complete, 58% of voters had said “no” to the proposition on the ballot paper—put forward by an alliance of opposition groups—to ditch the president. Soon afterwards, a victorious Mr Chávez appeared on the balcony of the presidential palace in Caracas to sing to the cheering crowds of supporters below.
His opponents quickly denounced the results as a “gigantic fraud”. Henry Ramos Allup, one of the opposition alliance’s leaders, said they would begin gathering evidence to show that the results had been faked. More important will be the eventual pronouncements of the election observers sent by the Organisation of American States and the Carter Centre (of Jimmy Carter, a former United States president). But with Mr Chávez winning by a margin of around 1.5m votes, any vote-fixing would need to have been on a massive scale to alter the outcome. So it looks like Mr Chávez has comfortably seen off his opponents and will continue governing the South American oil-producing country until at least 2007.
Ironically for Mr Chávez, it was his own constitutional reforms, passed five years ago, that introduced the recall mechanism—which is similar to the one that led to Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California. Mr Chávez’s opponents claimed, late last year, that their petition demanding the referendum had gathered comfortably more than the 2.4m signatures they needed. But the CNE, on which Mr Chávez’s supporters have a majority, ruled that more than 1m signatures on the petition were suspect. In May, the voters concerned were required to reconfirm them. Enough did so to oblige Mr Chávez to let the referendum go ahead.
However, having overcome all the obstacles that the president and his officials put in their way, the opposition ran a lacklustre campaign, letting their initial lead in the opinion polls fade away. They failed to put forward a convincing alternative leader who might have taken Mr Chávez’s place if he had been voted out.
Furthermore, the president has remained popular among Venezuela’s poorest, despite the way his policies have impoverished the country. Since he was first elected six years ago, Venezuelans’ average income has fallen by around a quarter. The recent surge in oil prices has showered the government in oil revenues, allowing Mr Chávez to introduce some populist social programmes that may have swung him the vote. But these handouts are unlikely to compensate fully for years of steep economic decline, nor for roaring inflation (around 30% last year).
Mr Chávez, a former army colonel, had tried to seize power in a failed coup in 1992, before winning it democratically in 1998 (and again in 2000). Since becoming president he has pursued what he calls his “Bolivarian revolution”, inspired by Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan-born general who led the Andean region’s fight for independence from Spain in the early 19th century. Also partly inspired by Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba, Mr Chávez has sought to wrest Venezuela’s main institutions—from the courts to the state oil company—from the hands of the elite “oligarchy”. This has led to violent clashes between opponents and supporters of the president.
Emerging victorious from the recall vote, Mr Chávez promised that his government would continue pumping oil, to help stabilise the world market. Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, providing around 13% of America’s oil imports. So, though Mr Chávez, with his fierce anti-capitalist rhetoric, is hardly a market trader’s pin-up, his soothing comments were welcomed, and brought American light crude down from the record high of $46.91 a barrel it had reached shortly before the results were announced.
Against reform, in favour of democracy
Mr Chávez’s apparent victory may be another manifestation of poorer Latin Americans’ loss of faith in the free-market reforms that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s. These lifted many people into the middle classes but failed to reach some of those at the bottom of the heap. A Latinobarómetro poll taken in 18 Latin American countries, published exclusively in the current edition of The Economist (see article), showed that 71% agreed that their country was “governed for the benefit of a few powerful interests”.
In several recent elections, voters have opted for candidates espousing leftish policies and railing against “neo-liberalism”, such as Argentina’s President Néstor Kirchner and Brazil’s President Lula da Silva (though the latter has continued with orthodox economic policies). In Venezuela’s Andean neighbour, Bolivia, rising protests by Amerindian groups and coca growers forced the resignation last year of the country’s free-market president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
But despite their disillusionment, the region’s voters do not want a return to the military dictatorships that ran much of Latin America until the 1980s. The Latinobarómetro poll shows that Venezuelans are among the region’s strongest supporters of democracy, with 74% agreeing that it is preferable to any other kind of government, a rise of 12 percentage points since a similar poll in 1996. What is now needed for the voters’ faith in the ballot-box to be vindicated is for Mr Chávez’s opponents to accept the referendum result (assuming it is verified) and for the president himself to stop stirring up strife and start doing a better job of running the country.
