Venezuela's Chávez Pushes Re-Election

He didn't raise the idea until after the regional elections. Here's why.

President Hugo Chávez kept largely quiet during the campaign for last month's state and municipal elections about his plan to attempt all over again to reform the constitution and remove a ban on successive re-election. His proposal to lift the ban on more than two successive presidential terms unraveled at a referendum December 2 last year. This was his first electoral reverse since he was first voted into power in late 1998, and it appears to have prompted him into a re-think.

Last time round, Chávez threw in all sorts of other constitutional changes into a complicated referendum package. This proposed amending no less than 26 Articles of the Bolivarian Constitution adopted at Chávez' behest in 1999, his first year in office. These included, for instance, a populist reduction of the working day from eight to six hours. They came to be seen as electoral sweeteners.

If that were the game plan, it didn't work. The referendum invited voters to decide on all the proposed changes in one fell swoop. There was no opportunity for them to cherry-pick the ones they liked and deny the ones they didn't. The choice was all or nothing, and in the end it was nothing. Citizens obliged to cast a single vote at the referendum rejected the entire lot by a majority of two percentage points. With this, Chávez' baby, re-election, was thrown out with the bath water.

The energy that he's now putting into reviving the re-election issue is deemed to lend weight to suspicions that this was what the last referendum was actually all about. The perceived wisdom now has it that all the rest was window-dressing.

Now, with the regional elections out of the way he's going for broke with plans for a second referendum and he wants to go to the wire as soon as possible, if not quicker. And this time, if he gets his way, it'll be a single-issue referendum with nothing else to muddy the waters.

The fact that he said nothing about resurrecting re-election during an election campaign in which he played a big part for his ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is seen as a sign that he was worried the issue might work against the party.

In the immediate wake of the referendum defeat a year ago, Chávez publicly railed against his supporters for letting him down. Today, it's said he still harbors doubts about some of them, including members of his own PSUV. Detailed analysis of the election results and party records show that the PSUV wasn't always able to get out even all its own members to vote. Or, worse still, that if they did, they took advantage of the secrecy of the ballot to vote the other way.

It wouldn't have been the first time that people have joined political parties for reasons of personal opportunism rather than ideological commitment. Older hands at the PSUV mutter about bolíborgos, an epithet for bourgeoisie who sign up with the Bolivarian party for reasons of their own and whose loyalty is suspect. As to the other pro-Chávez parties such as Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV), there are misgivings about them, too, and have been for months.

First, they declined to join the PSUV and vanish into history. Then they niggled that the PSUV was hogging nominations for last month's election. Meeting with a rebuff, they ran their own candidates against the PSUV in some constituencies. They were wiped away at state level, losing three governorships. Chávez and PSUV members have since done nothing to hide their glee with this revenge.

In private, activists at the small parties think they are on the outs with Chávez as much as the mainstream opposition. That in turn prompts thoughts about having nothing to lose.

If Chávez was wondering about PPT's view of his re-election revival plan, he didn't have long to wait. PPT party secretary Rafael Uzcátegui dismissed the idea as a "messianic version" because it applied only to the president and not other elected official's limits subject to term limits. In the absence of anything in the public domain, the PCV is said to hold similar views.

Prevented from proposing a new referendum on re-election because he lost last time, Chávez has been mulling ideas about who should do so in his stead. Normal practice in calling a referendum is to organize a petition signed by a fifth or more of people listed on the electoral register. But there is an alternative: getting the National Assembly to directly vote for a referendum.

The petition route poses all the relatively new doubts about individual and party loyalties. Chávez has stated his preference for using the legislature. The top echelon at the PSUV is due to take a decision soon, but now that El Comandante has spoken the result of that is taken as a foregone conclusion. The Assembly is dominated by PSUV legislators.