In Caracas on 12 December Vice President and Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro announced after six hours of a “complex, difficult, delicate operation," in Cuba to remove cancerous tissue President Hugo Chávez faced a complex and hard post-operative process”.
Chávez returned to Havana for an extended period for further medical treatment on 9 December, a day after he declared his number two Nicolás Maduro as his preferred successor in the event of his departure from power.
Maduro’s anointment was long expected but it was the first time that Chávez had ever addressed in public the issue of his succession. Clearly, he wants to leave things all tied up and his insistence on the constitutional order of things was notable, not least given the concerns about the commitment of some in the ruling Partido Unido Socialista de Venezuela (PSUV) to a legal transition.
Unfortunately for Chávez, the question now is all about the timing of his departure from the presidency.
Under the constitution: If a president becomes permanently incapacitated in his final two years, the vice-president takes over and sees out the term. If a president-elect becomes permanently incapacitated before taking office, the national assembly president (the hard-line Diosdado Cabello) temporarily assumes power and must convene elections in 30 days. In this case, Chávez is both the outgoing president and the president-elect, so there has been confusion as to which rule should have precedent; however, the consensus is that Cabello would step in.
If a president becomes permanently incapacitated in the first four years of his six-year term the vice-president takes over and must convene elections within 30 days. There had been talk of a constitutional reform so as to remove this break clause - allowing the vice-president to take over and remain in office without the need for fresh elections - but that is now unlikely.
Chávez tacitly admitted to a risk that he might not be able to assume office on 10 January. That would immediately trigger elections under Cabello. An alternative scenario is that he assumes office but then steps aside/resigns, again triggering immediate elections. In both scenarios, stepping aside could potentially allow Chávez to campaign on Maduro's behalf in the elections, greatly increasing Maduro's chance of victory against the presumptive opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski.
The PSUV held an emergency meeting in Caracas on 10 December attended by Maduro, Cabello, who doubles as the PSUV's first vice-president, and its 23 gubernatorial candidates for the 16 December regional elections. Elías Jaua, the PSUV's flagship candidate (he is competing against Capriles in the central state of Miranda) denied that the PSUV intended to cancel the regional elections and reiterated Chávez's day-earlier calls for unity.
More than ever, Capriles now urgently needs to win convincingly against Jaua in Miranda. If he doesn’t, he won't stand a chance against Maduro. “Venezuela doesn’t have succession,” Capriles complained. “This is not Cuba nor is it a monarchy". Others in the opposition sniffed that Fidel Castro had chosen Venezuela's next president.
- Cabello – an unknown quantity
“Even the opposition should be praying that Chávez gets better…He is the guarantee of peace in the country”, Cabello declared on state TV after Chávez’s address. It was an odd statement; appearing to hold out the prospect of violence. The opposition media is putting it about that Cabello and his hard-line military contacts might move against Maduro in the event that Chávez fails to recover.
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