The rallying call of an opposition: “You’re out, Chávez.”

20/09/2010

“Yes we can.” The simple three word slogan that united Barack Obama’s positively youthful and exuberant 2008 Presidential campaign has long since been forgotten in the mean-spirited, ever-partisan American political environment. Many pundits have dismissed the possibility of anything other than massive Democratic losses in the upcoming Midterm elections, and as a result are either rejoicing or resigning themselves to the likely reality of a lame duck President.

Though something similar is going on in Venezuela, a different type of three word slogan has galvanized the youthful opposition there. Unlike Obama’s, this rallying call is angry: “Chávez tás ponchao”, which in baseball-crazy Venezuelan Spanish translates to “you’re out, Chavez”.

Venezuelans also have a penchant for sports metaphors, and the strikeout for which the opposition is waiting could come in the Parliamentary elections later this week.

There is one obvious similarity: just as Obama will remain President after the American Midterm elections, the choices to be made by Venezuelans on the 26th cannot result in Hugh Chávez losing his job. What they can do is make the two years leading up to the next Presidential election a rockier road; they can make fulfilling the goals of his often convoluted Bolivarian revolution substantially more difficult, and most importantly, they can prove it’s possible for him to lose.

Like in the United States, the Representatives who lose their seats in Venezuela may not be losing them for their own political ineptitude; this vote will be a referendum on the Chávez Presidency. And just as merely being a Democrat may be enough for some American politicians to lose their jobs in November, Representatives in Chavez’s PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) could find themselves in the same boat on the 26th.

The main opposition is the Coalition for Democratic Unity (La Mesa de la Unidad Democrática) and they’ve brought together parties as ideologically polarized as Communists and Centre-Right champions of trade liberalization. They have candidates on 98% of the federal candidate lists, and really don’t seem to have given much thought to how they’ll cooperate if they do manage to take back control of the unicameral National Assembly.

The only priority right now is to stop Chávez.

The irony is that they owe this opportunity to wrestle power away from him and the PSUV to Chávez and the PSUV themselves: they sat out on the 2005 Parliamentary elections and the PSUV used their control to pass The Suffrage and Political Participation Law last December. This law made it so that whichever alliance of parties wins 51% of the votes automatically gets 70% of the seats—a consolidation of power tactic that could end up backfiring.

Ismael García, General Secretary of the Podemos Party—formerly an ally of PSUV, now in firm opposition—explained that opposition by saying, “I believe in a Democratic Socialism that attends to the poor and the productive sectors. But what Chávez has imposed on Venezuela is state capitalism where the Government controls everything.”

Control is the word—the theme; because of the myriad issues the Venezuelan elections should be addressing, none can compete with those ominous dictatorial qualities of the regime. This isn’t the stuff of Tea Party rallies—like debates over the efficacy of Keynesian economic policies and public health care. This is way more fundamental than that. These are questions of indefinite reelection and freedom of the press.

The Obama administration doesn’t censor Fox news. On the other hand, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) was shut down this past January for refusing to air Chávez’s verbose speeches in their entirety, hour after hour.

The Director of RCTV, Marcel Granier, told Washington Post reporter Juan Forero: “Those in the government simply do not tolerate any medium that tells people how things really are.”

Similarly, Globovision has seen its autonomy disappear as a result of its unsavory views of the President-Commander. In July the State estimated it was in control of 48.5% of the network after one shareholder died and another—Nelson Mezerhane—saw his share expropriated because of his ‘fugitive status’ in the country.

Always the thorn in each others’ sides while he was in office, President Uribe at least respected the decision of Colombia’s Supreme Court to prevent him from running for a third term; it took a second referendum for Chávez to win the right to be reelected indefinitely. Whether that really means President-for-life can’t be determined on the26th. The results, however, should go a long way in demonstrating whether there is even a chance it could happen in 2012.