Wednesday, November 19, 2008

PPT complains about the tone of the election campaign; Podemos chides CNE

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan):
Social democratic party Podemos kept on hammering away at the National Electoral Council (CNE), demanding "rigorous application" of the rules to everybody and claiming these had been weakened by the government's "abuse" in using state television VTV.

Podemos secretary-general Ismael Garcia repeated his claim Monday that the CNE broke its own rules by contracting an opinion poll after announcing Sunday that the use of these was specifically prohibited in the week before the elections next Sunday. CNE director Vicente Diaz responded to this charge late Monday by denying the CNE had done any such thing.

Garcia argued that the elections would not only be about state and municipal authorities but also the fate of President Hugo Chavez' failed attempt to reform the Constitution last year, including a proposal to lift a ban on more than two consecutive presidential terms. This was rejected by a narrow margin at a referendum last December -- Chavez' first electoral reverse since he assumed office in 1999.

The opposition was still arguing points on the campaign trail, and making most of the running in the closing stages of the election debate. Morel Rodriguez, who's seeking re-election as one of only two state governors identified with the opposition, said his voters in Nueva Esparta should look at the example of Cuba and then go to the polling station.

This was not an entirely unfair jibe at the president's penchant for Cuban ways and its ageing leader, Fidel Castro. Quite a lot of Chavez' political attitudes and lexicon look to be cloned off Castro, not least a tendency to label the United States as "The Empire."

Student leader Jon Goicoechea urged people to vote because otherwise it would be "indefinite re-election" -- a reference to the widespread belief that, once the elections are out of the way, Chavez and his ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) plan to try again to do away with constitutional restrictions on his years in power.

PSUV party vice president Alberto Muller Rojas was also trying to get out the voters, and applied the heavy hand in order to do so.
After proclaiming that Sunday would see a record level of electoral participation, he warned that members of the PSUV who didn't vote would automatically "exclude themselves" from the party.

Abstention and apathy, long haunting specters for the opposition, are now thought to be worrying the top echelon at the PSUV, and perhaps not least with some observers saying the party could lose seven or eight states and memories of the referendum defeat less than a year ago. Chavez publicly berated some of his supporters in Miranda state when he failed to prevail on that occasion, and it's said the wound hasn't healed yet.

Interior and Justice Minister Tarek El Aissami announced that the purchase or public consumption of alcohol would be banned between two o'clock next Friday until the same hour the following Monday. More reasonably, he said the carrying of firearms would also be prohibited. This merely posed questions about why it wasn't all the time.

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