Chávez Supporters Win 17 out of 23 Venezuelan States, but Lose 3 Most Populous

from venezuelanalysis.com

President Hugo Chavez’s governing party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) got mixed results in the regional and local elections today, winning stronghly in 17 out of 23 states, but losing the country’s two most populous states and the Capital District of Caracas, with two more states still to be decided.

At midnight Venezuelan time, about eight hours after the first polls closed, the president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE), Tibisay Lucena, announced the results of the regional and local elections, with 95% of the vote counted.

According to Lucena, participation had reached an unprecedented high for a regional vote, at 65.45%. Over 17 million voters were registered, which is several million more than in the last such election four years ago. As a result, lines tended to be long and many polling places had to remain open far longer than the official closing time of 4pm.

Chávez’s PSUV lost the governorships of the two most populous states, Miranda and Zulia, and the mayor’s office of greater Caracas, which will be a significant blow to Chávez and his movement.

The perhaps greatest surprise is the upset victory, with 52.45% of the vote, of opposition leader Antonio Ledezma, of the Brave People’s Alliance, in greater Caracas. Ledezma once was governor of the city, from 1992 to 1995, when it was an appointed office. He was then elected as mayor of the city’s main municipality of Libertador in 1995. Ledezma is considered to be an integral part of the country’s old political guard, given his ties to former President Carlos Andrés Perez.

His challenger this time around was Aristóbulo Isturiz, also a former mayor of Libertador, and former education minister for Chávez. Isturiz is one of the few Afro-Venezuelan politicians of Venezuela with national name-recognition.

The other upset victory is in the state of Miranda, one of the country’s most populous and wealthiest states, where Henrique Capriles Radonski won with 52.56% of the vote, against Diosdado Cabello, the incumbent governor and close confidant of President Chávez. Capriles was able to win on the basis of his success as mayor of the upper class Caracas municipality of Baruta, against Cabello’s relatively poor performance in Miranda.

Finally, the third key opposition victory was in Zulia, where Pablo Perez, the right-hand man of current governor and opposition leader Manuel Rosales beat GianCarlo DiMartino 53.6% to 45.0%. Zulia is another relatively wealthy state with some of the country’s main oil deposits and the largest population.

Another opposition win was in the state of Nueva Esparta, which is mainly the tourist island of Margarita, and which was generally an expected opposition victory.

States where the opposition might still win include the industrial state of Carabobo, where the former opposition governor Henrique Salas Feo is running against PSUV candidate Mario Silva, who is the former host of the satirical talk show “The Razor Blade.” The other state for which no result has been announced is the border state of Táchira, on the Colombian border.

The 17 states where Chávez’s candidates won, they managed to do so often by beating both the opposition candidates and dissident Chávez supporters. For example, PSUV candidate and former communications minister William Lara beat, with 52.1% of the vote, Lenny Manuitt, the daughter of the former pro-Chávez governor in Guarico state.

The Process

Whilst it was aimed to have voting centers closed by 4pm, the president of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, said that they would remain open as long as there were voters in waiting in line to vote. Some opposition leaders, including Julio Borges from Justice First party, Henry Ramos from Democratic Action and Ismael Garcia from We Can, denounced the extension of voting hours and threatened not to recognize the results.

By 9pm, according to the chief of the Strategic Operational Command (CEO), General Jesus Gonzalez, more than 50 people had been arrested and 106 detained for various electoral crimes. Other than that voting was considered to have proceeded very normally and calmly.

Gonzalez said the vast majority of the crimes were destruction of electoral material, and for distributing political pamphlets. A large proportion of the violations were for tearing up the voting receipt.

In the state of Anzoategui a group of people on motorbikes removed two rifles from militia acting as part of Plan Republic, aimed at protecting the voting center.

Chávez Congratulates Nation

In a late-night address to the nation, President Chávez congratulated the Venezuelan people for having participated in the electoral event in a “civic and joyful” manner.

The event “ratifies” Venezuelan democracy, but not like the “democracy of before” his election to the presidency, which “belonged to the elites,” said Chávez.

Chávez also conceded defeat in the state of Miranda and of the capital district, asking, “Who can say that there is a dictatorship in Venezuela? Well, perhaps some will continue to say so.”

However, he highlighted that of the 17 governorships his party had won, eight of these it won with about 60% of the vote and the others with about 10% difference to the closest rival. Also, his party garnered about six million votes, which represents a significant development for his recently formed party, the PSUV.

This result for the PSUV compares to the approximately four million votes the opposition obtained, according to PSUV vice-president Alberto Müller Rojas, and thus maintains the ratio of previous elections (except last year’s constitutional reform referendum, which was barely lost 51-49), of more or less 60-40 in favor of Chavez’s Bolivarian movement.

For Chávez, “The construction of socialism in Venezuela is ratified and now we will now take charge of deepening it.”

Tamara Pearson also contributed to this article.
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Comment: this election should, hopefully, calm down the knee-jerk "socialism bashers" who claim that socialist regimes are never democratic: the fact is that Chavez, unlike his CIA funded opponents, is a democrat *and* a socialist and that socialism is neither more nor less inherently democratic than capitalism as both of these economic models can be democratic and both of these can turn democracy into a farce.

Turning to the bigger picture for a minute, it is very heartening to see that almost all of Latin America (except Colombia) has now thrown off the yoke of US imperialism and is doing what Europe failed to do: gradually developing a regional development model. While the case of Bolivia has clearly shown that very real risks of direct US intervention, I am hopeful that the continent is gradually reaching a point of no return in which the old hyper-capitalist American stooges are gradually loosing their grip on power and, to use the Soviet expression, are finally headed for the "trash heaps of history".

The Saker