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[Lexington]

Source: The Economist

ON SEPTEMBER 12th a queue of stationary vehicles kilometres long blocked the coastal highway that leads out of Puerto Cabello. “Politics,” said a resident, wearily, by way of explanation.

The politics in question were taking place beside the entrance to the port city’s weed-infested airstrip. A small group of supporters was waiting to escort Henrique Capriles Radonski, the opposition candidate in Venezuela’s presidential election, to a rally in town. A couple of hundred red-shirted supporters of President Hugo Chávez were throwing stones at them from across the highway as a sound system blasted out campaign songs. A pickup truck had been set on fire. “The opposition has no right to come here and deceive working people,” said Luis Rojas, one of the stone-throwers and also an employee of the city’s chavista mayor.

Mr Chávez, a former lieutenant-colonel who preaches radical socialism and rails against American imperialism, is seeking to be elected president for the fourth time on October 7th. But after nearly 14 years in power, he faces an unprecedented electoral challenge to his autocratic regime. A previously weak and divided opposition, prone to political miscalculation, has set aside its differences to form a seemingly solid coalition of parties from the left and right, under the banner of the Democratic Unity coalition (MUD).

To the surprise even of the MUD’s supporters, more than 3m of Venezuela’s 19m registered voters took part in its primary election last February, choosing Mr Capriles by a commanding majority. A former governor of Miranda state, which includes large parts of the capital, Caracas, 40-year-old Mr Capriles is 18 years younger than Mr Chávez. He is energetic, centrist and an impressive enough campaigner never so far to have lost an election.

This seems to have rattled the Chávez regime, as the fire and smoke on the Puerto Cabello highway show. The local branch of the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) announced its intention to disrupt the MUD rally at a press conference the day before; municipal vehicles were laid on to take the chavistas out there. A dozen people were injured and several vehicles belonging to the opposition looted; the mayor blamed the violence on Mr Capriles. It was not the only one of his recent rallies to have been disrupted by orchestrated violence.

Mr Capriles eventually arrived at his campaign event by getting a lift in a fishing boat. The speech the chavistas did not want him to give was a brief set of promises to maintain and expand Mr Chávez’s social programmes while eliminating the corruption and favouritism that blights them. He also addressed local problems: the biggest round of applause was for his pledge to end power cuts. With a big electricity generating station nearby, Mr Capriles said, “the lights should never go out here.” A few days before, Puerto Cabello had suffered a 12-hour power-cut. Unscheduled blackouts are frequent there, as they are almost everywhere in the country outside the capital.

Mr Capriles remains the underdog. But deteriorating infrastructure and growing frustration give him a better chance than he might have expected. Despite the entrenched strength of his position, Mr Chávez has disappointed enough of his countrymen to be facing the fight of his life.

Polling discrepancies
At the previous presidential election, in 2006, Mr Chávez was at the height of his popularity. He trounced the opposition candidate, Manuel Rosales, by 63% to 37%. With that sweeping mandate he nationalised an important chunk of the economy, closed down the most popular private television channel and weakened the powers of elected state and local governments, many of them in the hands of other parties. He went on to win, at the second attempt, a referendum abolishing term limits, allowing him to campaign for a further six years in office at this election.

Opinion polls—some, admittedly, carried out by companies firmly in the president’s camp—suggest he will win again. Most continue to give the president a lead of 10% or more. But others suggest that the two main candidates are neck and neck. Some even put Mr Capriles slightly ahead.

According to Luis Christiansen of Consultores 21, the polls share some common features despite their differing results. None of the established polling companies puts Mr Chávez above 50% in voting intentions this time. And the percentage of undecided respondents and those who won’t say is generally greater than the gap between the two main candidates. The president’s support has remained static in most polls and declined in a few. Mr Capriles has gradually gained ground. But has he done enough to win?

Mr Chávez remains a formidable opponent. He says he is free of the cancer for which he has been operated on three times—though his rallies have been noticeably fewer, and smaller, than in past campaigns. He has an armlock on the country’s institutions. Government buildings and websites are plastered with election propaganda, a violation of electoral law that has been met with only the most timid of protests from the mostly pro-government board of the electoral authority.



The media, which were a hotbed of anti-government sentiment from the time of Mr Chávez’s first election to his winning of 2004’s recall referendum, have been largely tamed. The president frequently commandeers all television channels for broadcasts that can last for hours; election rules limit Mr Capriles to three minutes of pre-recorded campaign broadcasting a day. This is just one way that the election, in the words of Ramón Guillermo Aveledo, secretary-general of the MUD, “will be free, but not fair”.

As well as the advantages of abused office, Mr Chávez can boast enduring popularity among a broad swathe of poorer Venezuelans. They like him for his charisma, humble background and demotic speech. They trust him to act in their interests. His years in power have coincided with a sustained surge in the price of oil, Venezuela’s main export (see chart 1), providing a windfall which he has used for wage increases and social programmes.



Thanks largely to the government’s economic mismanagement, Venezuela suffered more than the rest of Latin America from the 2008 financial crisis, and Mr Chávez’s popularity dipped as a result. With the oil price recovered, the economy is now growing at an annual rate of around 5%. Yet as well as making more money from oil, Venezuela is also piling on the debt, both through public borrowing and through the borrowing of Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil monopoly (see chart 2). Under Mr Chávez the oil company has been turned into a bloated, all-purpose development agency with which to dispense largesse. Three-fifths of Venezuela’s oil revenues are siphoned off into off-budget funds under the president’s personal control, according to Francisco Rodríguez, an economist at Bank of America who used to work for Venezuela’s National Assembly.

Your vote—or no new house

Over the past year or so, the president has begun to spend his war chest. Mr Rodríguez calculates that public spending has expanded by 30% in real terms over the 12 months to August. Some of this has gone on new “grand missions”, as Mr Chávez calls his social programmes, the most important of which promised in 2010 to provide over 350,000 new homes by the end of 2012. That compares with under 600,000 new homes (by official estimates) in the previous 11 years. Over 3m people are registered for the new programme, providing the government with valuable electoral data. The government insists that an opposition victory would dash the hopes of the homeless.

“No member of the bourgeoisie wants anything to do with the people,” says María Ascanio, attending a chavista rally in Caracas on September 22nd. “The Venezuelan people have opened their eyes [to that].” She had been bused in from the Tuy valleys, an outlying district of the capital, and says she is one of 16,000 people in her municipality who has registered for a house. Like 2,500 others she has had one allocated to her, but has been told, as have most of the others, that it will not be built until “after the election”. Ramona Caño, also from the Tuy valleys, is not yet among the beneficiaries, but says that “those of us who have not yet received the benefit are still hopeful.” Now 61, Ms Caño says she was illiterate before Mr Chávez came to power, but is now studying law. “Venezuela loves Chávez with guts, heart and mind,” she enthuses.

If love doesn’t do the trick, fear might. Some public employees—whose ranks have more than doubled under Mr Chávez to over 2m—have been obliged to fill out forms saying exactly where they will be voting. Like the election ballots, these forms require a signature and a thumbprint: the implication that the government will monitor how they vote does not need to be spelled out. Venezuelans remember that a chavista legislator published the names of 2.4m people who signed a petition that led to the 2004 recall referendum against Mr Chávez, with unpleasant repercussions for many. The MUD’s experts dismiss fears that the vote will not be secret. But the fingerprinting and sporadic violence will surely deter some potential opposition voters on October 7th.

Weary of mismanagement
According to Mr Christiansen’s polls, the new missions brought the president back into contention. But the bounce has not been on the same scale as the one he bought before the recall referendum, when with Cuban advice he set up the first missions, for health and education.

Puerto Cabello shows why that might be so. As the country’s main port, with a superb natural harbour, an oil refinery, Caribbean beaches and an attractive colonial district, it ought to be thriving. But locals gripe that the good jobs are given to outsiders, including Cubans. They complain of crime, unemployment and poor public services. On a scruffy patch of beach beside a small marina, José Miguel is putting out plastic chairs and assembling awnings from bent and rusty poles and torn canvas. A mechanic and construction worker, he says he hasn’t had a steady job in years. “I’m never voting for Chávez again,” he says. “Fourteen years in power and this is what we get?” With a sweep of his arm he indicates plastic waste and pools of stagnant water. The mayor, he says, never sends crews to clean the beach. “It gets cleaned because we pay someone to do it.”



Years of inadequate maintenance, corruption and incompetence have left Venezuela’s infrastructure in a sorry state. A blast in the Amuay oil refinery last month killed 42 people (six are still missing). Across the country, roads and bridges have collapsed or been washed away by rains, severing main transport arteries. A 180km (110-mile) railway linking Puerto Cabello with Maracay and other towns should have been ready this year. Although the concrete supports of its viaducts make dandy sites for sticking up government-propaganda posters, they do not have any railway tracks on top of them.

The state of the country’s public hospitals is another blemish on Mr Chávez’s record. The president has repeatedly promised 16 new hospitals, but as far as The Economist can tell only three seem to have been built. (The health ministry failed to answer repeated requests to confirm the number.) Poor wages and conditions have led thousands of doctors to abandon the public-health system for private clinics which the majority of the country’s people—most of whom are uninsured—will never be able to afford. All public hospitals are short of supplies and many are partly closed. The doctors’ federation says that the country has only half the doctors it needs and that some hospitals have only a third of the staff they were designed for.

The government points to heroic spending on primary health care through Barrio Adentro (“Inside the barrio”), a mission set up by Cuban advisers in 2003. This has saved “over 2m lives”, claims Eugenia Sader, the health minister. The claim is ludicrous: only around 130,000 Venezuelans die each year. Doctors working in the primary-health “modules” of Barrio Adentro say at least a third of them are closed; if so, that would be an improvement on 2009, when Mr Chávez himself admitted that about half were closed, and another quarter operated only half-time. His information, he said, came from his ally Fidel Castro: it is the Cuban medical mission, not the Venezuelan government, that keeps the books on Barrio Adentro.

The government’s shortcomings are more palpable than they were six years ago. The opposition’s candidate is more plausible. Mr Rosales was provincial, a poor speaker and old fashioned. Mr Capriles, who was a mayor and a member of parliament before he wrested the governorship of Miranda from Diosdado Cabello, a close associate of Mr Chávez, has a lively campaign style. He portrays himself as a Brazilian-style social democrat who shares the people’s concerns while shunning the government’s corruption. Rather than concentrating on the bastions of the opposition in the bigger cities he has criss-crossed the country, saying he will visit 300 marginal or strongly chavista districts (the Puerto Cabello rally was one such incursion). As well as promising to preserve the popular social programmes, including houses for the homeless, Mr Capriles has pledged a rise in the minimum wage and land titles for peasant farmers along with a lot of investment in infrastructure, especially in electricity and transport.

Mr Capriles, provider of democratic choice and the occasional hat

Democracy, or communes
Mr Chávez is having none of it: the voters can join him in building “21st-century socialism”—which is the only way to save humankind—or hand the country back to an oligarchy serving the interests of the United States. Seizing on the MUD’s heterogeneity—it includes parties and figures from the widely reviled politics of the 1990s—he derides his opponents as the far right in leftist clothing, bent on a “neoliberal” economic squeeze. When not dismissing Mr Capriles as a spoiled rich kid with no ideas he calls him a “fascist”, at which Mr Capriles, some of whose great-grandparents died in the Treblinka concentration camp, takes understandable offence.

Margarita López Maya, an historian who has in the past been sympathetic to the Chávez project, says she is not persuaded that the MUD is wholly committed to the “participatory democracy” enshrined in the 1999 constitution. But she has become convinced that if the president is given a fresh mandate he will eventually eliminate democracy altogether.

In 2010, after the opposition had won control of many municipalities and states, Mr Chávez set up a system of communes—“socialist local entities”—across the country, presenting them as a way of devolving power to the people. The communes depend entirely on the central government. “Decisions are taken in assemblies by the raising of hands,” says Ms López Maya. “It is the Leninist idea of the soviet.” Now all the laws needed to abolish democratic local government and create a “communal state” have been drafted, Ms López Maya says. They are “just waiting for [victory on] October 7th.”[/size][/font][/color]
[color=#333333][font=Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][size=1]And what if Mr Chávez loses? He said earlier this month that a Capriles victory would lead to a “profound destabilisation” of Venezuela, which might even cause “civil war”. The opposition worries that the army might back the president if he decided not to recognise defeat. In 2010 General Henry Rangel Silva, now the defence minister, said the armed forces were “wedded” to Mr Chávez’s socialist project and would find it “difficult” to accept a change of government, though he later qualified these comments. The president himself often says the army is chavista.

Encouragingly, General Wilmer Barrientos, the armed forces’ senior operational commander, said in a television interview earlier this month that his institution would respect the election result. He pointed out that the constitution requires the army to be politically neutral, and said he would be willing to meet opposition representatives.

Even if the army is not chavista, though, most state institutions are. They will pose daunting problems to Mr Capriles if he wins. Should Mr Chávez win, he will try to use their power to make his “revolution” irreversible. But he is likely to find that power harder to wield in a country that is showing itself to be a lot more evenly divided than in the past.

[JIM16]

il peut encore mourir de son cancer du troudbal, tout n'est pas perdu

[noob]

il peut encore mourir de son cancer du troudbal, tout n'est pas perdu

Exactement, et si il a bien eu une rechute, alors son espérance de vie à 5 ans est de toute façon pas très élevée.

[pankkake]

Oui enfin Kim Jong-il et Steve Jobs sont tous les deux morts et ça ne les a pas empêchés d'avoir un successeur qui continue leur politique.

[Lucilio]

De toute façon, même si Capriles arrive à gagner grâce à un hallucinant miracle, c'est quand même qu'un social-démocrate pourri de chez étatiste. À se demander s'il ne vaut pas mieux que le gorille rouge reste au pouvoir jusqu'à l'effondrement du système. Politique du pire et toussa.

[bastiat]

Les provinces devraient faire sécession, la loi de la majorité est inaltérable. Si on ne veut pas de la politique des cons, on ne vote pas avec eux. Après le gorille rouge, il y en aura un autre..

[Tremendo]

De toute façon, même si Capriles arrive à gagner grâce à un hallucinant miracle, c'est quand même qu'un social-démocrate pourri de chez étatiste. À se demander s'il ne vaut pas mieux que le gorille rouge reste au pouvoir jusqu'à l'effondrement du système. Politique du pire et toussa.

+1
De toute façon Chavez a encore gagné. Des nouvelles sur le scrutin, sa validité toussa?? Apparemment Capriles a accepté sa défaite. Je suis surpris de l'ampleur de sa victoire, les vénézuéliens de l'étranger que je connais l'ont en horreur, comment est-ce possible qu'il regagne à nouveau?

[Rincevent]

Je suis surpris de l'ampleur de sa victoire, les vénézuéliens de l'étranger que je connais l'ont en horreur, comment est-ce possible qu'il regagne à nouveau?

Les Vénézuéliens de l'étranger n'ont pas la même opinion que ceux de l'intérieur. Ne serait-ce que parce que beaucoup ont fui le régime.

[JIM16]

et puis les francais aussi sont amoureux de leurs oppresseurs, ca n'est pas exclusif au Venezuela.

[Tremendo]

Les Vénézuéliens de l'étranger n'ont pas la même opinion que ceux de l'intérieur. Ne serait-ce que parce que beaucoup ont fui le régime.

Oui bien sûr je m'en doutais, mais le décalage est assez impressionnant entre vénézuéliens de l'intérieur et de l'extérieur

et puis les francais aussi sont amoureux de leurs oppresseurs, ca n'est pas exclusif au Venezuela.

Oui c'est vrai il y a de nombreux points communs, ça ne dit rien de bon.

[Fagotto]

Oui bien sûr je m'en doutais, mais le décalage est assez impressionnant entre vénézuéliens de l'intérieur et de l'extérieur

Il y a tout simplement beaucoup de voix pas chères à "acheter" au Venezuela.

[poney]

Mauvaises langues.
Mélenchon arrête pas de dire que c'est un type bien.

[Tremendo]

En tout cas les réactions en direct dans les studios de la télé publique ne laissaient aucun doute quant à leurs préférences et au concept de neutralité de la télé publique à la vénézuélienne.
Ils ne se cachent même plus, au moins en France il y a une joie contenue quand la gauche gagne, mais là-bas le mot "contenu" prend un autre sens,

[Lucilio]

Une des ironies les plus délicieuses et cruelles de l'ère Chávez est que ses résultats financiers et économiques sont précisément ceux de la caricature faite par lui des pays capitalistes : depuis qu'il s'est emparé du pouvoir, la bourse vénézuélienne a gagné 870% et les salaires réels des travailleurs ont chuté de 40%. Un petit groupe proche de l'autocrate fait de juteuses affaires, que ce soit via des contrats avec l'État, des licences d'importations, des taux de changes bidonnés ou de papiers de la dette de pays alliés. La « bolibourgeoisie » est passée maître en matière de « capitalisme sauvage » !

http://www.foreignaf...z-does-business

[Tremendo]

En ce moment sur twitter je me bastonne avec un mélenchonniste fan de Chavez.
C'est fou comme ces types sont sûrs de leur fait, un niveau d'embrigadement rare. J'avais jamais pu expérimenter à quel point les cocos pouvaient avoir des oeillères aussi grandes.

[JIM16]

ah bah oui, moi je connais meme des trotzkystes qui sont pret a nier les consequences nefastes du communimse en URSS.Tout est bon dans le cochon.

[poney]

JIM16, splendide nouvel avatar…. j'ai raté une discussion ?

[JIM16]

hihi

[pankkake]

Pourquoi Chavez a été ré-élu :
http://www.reddit.co...jwp8b?context=1
Scrollez pour la traduction.

Pauvre pays.

[Tramp]

Ce pays où il fait temps bon vivre :

http://www.lefigaro....des-explose.php