Tag Archives: Democratic Unity

Oct
4
2010
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Chavez vows to radicalize after Venezuela election

This article was originally posted by Reuters Africa

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez vowed to “radicalize” his socialist revolution even further after legislative elections that gave the opposition one of its strongest showings during his more than 11 years in power.

He started on Sunday by announcing the expropriation of land owned by the Venezuelan agricultural company Agroislena and vowing to hasten the nationalization of land held by the British meat products company Vestey Foods Group.

Chavez’s ruling Socialist Party won last weekend’s vote by a slim margin, taking 5.45 million votes or 48.9 percent compared with 5.33 million votes or 47.9 percent for the newly united Democratic Unity umbrella group.

The result lifted the optimism of the opposition, which now sees a chance to unseat Chavez in 2012 presidential elections.

Investors and analysts are waiting to see the reaction of a man who has in the past come out of elections by nationalizing swathes of industry, including millions of acres of agricultural land, and attacking private capital.

“We are going to continue forward, democratically radicalizing the socialist revolution because it is necessary,” Chavez said late on Saturday to a television audience.

He dismissed the opposition celebration of a moral victory as “15 minutes of drunkenness.”

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Sep
29
2010
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Chávez, on the Ropes

This article was originally posted by The New Republic

Sunday’s parliamentary election in Venezuela saw Chávez’s governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela slump to a landslide. Chavistas walked off with 59 percent of the seats in Venezuela’s single-chamber National Assembly on the back of just 48 percent of the vote, all thanks to a well-known list of unfair voting conditions that left the playing field far from level: an aggressively gerrymandered map, massive rural overrepresentation, and blatantly biased election rules approved by a blatantly biased Elections Commission.

Though routed in the seat count, the vote felt like a win—and a coming of age—for opposition activists. Gone are the days when the words “Venezuelan opposition” conjured a hodge-podge of ancien regime holdovers and reactionary cranks. The vote was a milestone in the opposition’s gradual transformation into an organized mass political movement able to credibly challenge Chávez for the allegiance of everyday Venezuelans.

Working in tremendously challenging circumstances against a hyper-empowered petrostate that had put all its resources into the campaign, the opposition’s umbrella Roundtable for Democratic Unity (the unfortunately anagramed M.U.D.) went toe-to-toe with chavismo, coming within 90,000 votes (out of eleven million cast) of matching their tally. (A small anti-Chavez left-wing party got the remaining 3 percent.)

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