Development: On 13 May President Hugo Chávez tweeted “a thousand congratulations” to the mothers of Venezuela and to Pastór Maldonado, the first ever Venezuelan to win a Formula One motor race.
Significance: In an interview to mark yesterday’s Mother’s Day, Mónica Radonski, the mother of the opposition presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, said she was urgently looking for a wife and first lady for her bachelor son. Mrs Radonski is jumping the gun, if the polls are anything to go by. According to the latest Datanálasis survey, Chávez is still running well ahead in the 2012 race, with 43% of voting intentions to just 26% for Capriles. Chávez arrived back in Caracas on Friday (11 May) and in a national TV and radio broadcast declared that he had “successfully concluded the entire round of radiotherapy” for his cancer.
Key points:
• A visibly brighter Chávez sang a little ditty and promised that the pending first quarter GDP results, which are late in appearing, would be “very good”. That’s no surprise - thanks to continued record high oil prices, the government is aggressively pump priming the economy this election year, with national treasury disbursements up 28% year-on-year in real terms in the first four months of 2012, on the latest finance ministry figures.
• The opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) has been unable to hide its disappointment with Capriles’s poll standing. After the euphoria of his landslide primary election win in February, the MUD could taste victory. Since then, Capriles has been criss-crossing the country non-stop in an effort to connect with voters and set out his stall, all the time spinning a relentlessly upbeat, energetic and inclusive message (and deliberately avoiding any personal attacks on Chávez). However his efforts have been completely overshadowed by the constant speculation about Chávez’s health and Capriles's promises on job creation and social progress have basically fallen on deaf ears.
• The presidential campaign formally gets underway on 1 July and runs to 4 October (ahead of the 7 October vote), and senior ministers insist repeatedly that Chávez is Plan A, B and C.
• Luis Vicente León, the director of Datanálasis, pointed out in June last year (when the president’s cancer first became public knowledge) that Chávez in fact does not need to pound the pavements like Capriles. After 13 years in power, such is his recognition and continued popularity that he can probably get away with a “virtual campaign” run largely over the airwaves, with limited public appearances. In fact, that might work better than betraying his physical frailties out on the stump. Venezuelans are well used to government over the airwaves. At the end of the day, all Chávez has to do is to convince his support base – which still numbers some 50% of the electorate – that he will govern the next presidential term (January 2013-December 2018). Everything after that is secondary.
• For instance, despite reservations amongst Chavistas about runaway crime and public insecurity, along with frustrations over the state provision of basic social necessities (food, housing, health and education), and doubts about corruption in the government, low income voters in particular are intensely loyal to Chávez the man. They firmly believe that he is the only one that represents them and is the only one capable of seeing through the Bolivarian movement’s social promises. These same voters, previously disenfranchised, are also easily swayed by Chávez’s deliberately polarising tactics, whereby he warns that a vote for the opposition “oligarchy” means a return to the bad old days. The fact that Capriles is running a ‘new-left’ campaign and has had to promise to retain the bulk of Chavez’s social programmes says it all.
• Capriles, who last week went to Colombia on the first of several planned regional trips, associates himself with the centre-left social democratic model so successfully implemented in neighbouring Brazil by Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and his successor Dilma Rousseff. Indeed both Capriles and Chávez have hired Brazilian PR advisors for their campaign teams. Lula, however, has recently made known his support for Chavez’s re-election. Like Colombia, Brazil wants stability on its borders. It is also the case that Brazilian companies, public and private, have done well out of the Lula-Chávez relationship.
• With five months to go, the Venezuelan opinion polls have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The electorate (of 18m) has been split almost evenly down the middle under Chávez. There is an unusually high proportion of undecideds this year; many want more information about the president’s illness before they make up their minds. These voters may decide the election. Despite the continued uncertainty surrounding Chávez, the government insists that the vote will go ahead as scheduled. Ahead of the official campaign, the next month will likely see a lot more smoke and mirrors in Caracas.
Pointer: As if the political scenario wasn’t surreal enough already, last week Venezuelan intelligence agents turned up at the offices of a local daily, Ultimas Noticias, to question its crossword puzzle editor, Neptali Segovia, who was accused of placing a coded message in a recent daily crossword urging the assassination of the president’s hard-line brother (and a rumoured potential successor), Adán Chávez. Answers to some of the clues in the crossword included the words ‘kill’, ‘blast’ and ‘Adán’. The accusation was made by a state TV presenter Miguel Angel Pérez Pirela, who noted that the French Resistance used similar tactics in the Second World War.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 904 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
