Development: On 7 October a puffy but enthusiastic President Hugo Chávez did a four-hour stint on the state channel VTV, where he officially launched (again) his campaign for re-election in October 2012. He was back on TV the next day, ratcheting up his electoral rhetoric.
Significance: In between rapping with an urban music artist, the cancer-struck Chávez re-launched the so-called Gran Polo Patriótico (GPP, Great Patriotic Pole), the broad alliance of left-wing political parties and civic groups he put together ahead of his first electoral bid in 1998. The move suggests concern that the opposition umbrella alliance, Mesa de la Unidad (MUD), has made sufficient strides in terms of its internal organisation and discipline to pose an actual threat to Chávez.
Chávez may also be aware that the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) brand is slightly damaged goods on the ground, where, in the key urban areas, it has developed a bit of a reputation for inefficiency, incompetence and corruption. Although polls indicate that Chávez retains a decent advantage, in order to secure victory in 2012 he needs to woo back disaffected supporters and that means broadening his appeal.
Key points:
• Chávez’s usual electoral tactics consist of deliberately inflaming the country’s bitter political polarisation and reminding his supporters that he is the only one on their side. He immediately cast the GPP against the “putrid, ultra right opposition pole” (i.e. the MUD). It remains to be seen if this dramatic and divisive rhetoric will work.
• The president called upon people to sign up at a new registration drive so that come 4 February 2012, “20 years after the patriotic military rebellion [when Chávez first attempted a coup d’état against the former president Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1993)], we will send out the cavalry, with joy and song”.
• Curiously enough, the website of the ruling PSUV reveals that almost exactly a year ago (11 October 2010), Chávez also‘re-launched’ the GPP in similarly dramatic fashion, so as to “pulverize in the 2012 elections the ‘pole’ that represents the oligarchy and its political fossils, encrusted in the traditional parties”.
• The original GPP consisted of Chávez’s Movimiento V República, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), Patria Para todos (PPT), Partido Socialista de Venezuela-Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo (PSV-MEP), Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV) and others. It dissolved in 2000 after the PPT withdrew, but came together again for the 2008 regional elections.
