Chavez may have handed weapon to critics in run-up to regional vote ... newly emerging cracks in President's camp.

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): President Hugo Chavez' penchant for hurling abuse at people he deems are not with him appears to be handing ammunition to the opposition less than six weeks away from the state and municipal elections on November 23.

The opposition has quickly latched on to his high-profile denunciation of Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV), two minor parties allied to his cause, as "counter-revolutionaries" who would be buried by the voters for not backing candidates of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and nominating their own in a string of states.

Moves are afoot to summon the pro-government Patriotic Alliance to patch up differences. But opposition activists hope the damage has been done.

They see the presidential outbursts against erstwhile friend and long-term foe as a bad attack of nerves about the outcome of the vote – and a note of barely disguised glee in their reaction to his onslaught on PPT and the PCV shouldn't surprise anybody. Albeit perhaps only for now, the pattern of Venezuelan politics in recent years has been turned on its head. Time was when everybody (including PPT and the communists) dutifully toed the line in the Chavez camp while the opposition floundered in discord and disunity. That was then, this is now.

The disparate elements of the opposition have buried the hatchet, or at least for now, by largely settling on single unity candidates, while the President is at daggers drawn with some of his supporters. Public divisions within Chavez' camp first emerged when the social democrats at Podemos crossed to the opposition in protest against his bid to reform the constitution last December, which was defeated by a narrow margin at a referendum. Perhaps it was Podemos that made the difference.

Either way, Chavez had lost an election for the first time since assuming power in 1999. Ahead of next month's vote, the opposition senses an opportunity to inflict another historic blow on Chavez and his project -– providing they subdue their own differences.

The mainstream opposition quickly rallied round Zulia State Governor Manuel Rosales, and the candidate to succeed him, Pablo Perez, after Chavez decried the first as, among other things, "shameless" and a "Mafioso" who should be sent to jail, and the second as an "imbecile."

Alianza Bravo Pueblo party President Antonio Ledezma, the opposition's unity candidate for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas, asked out loud what Rosales and Perez could possibly else have expected given how Chavez treated parties on his own side. Rosales, who'd taunted Chavez about his supposed "friends in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and labeled him a liar, said every insult and impropriety on the part of the President would be repaid by an "avalanche of votes" in Zulia next month.

The Social Christians of Copei used Chavez' diatribes against erstwhile friend and long-term foe to depict a country facing two agendas at the ballot box: one of division, hatred and insults and the other of reconciliation and unity.