Chávez Shifts Ground on Presidential Re-Election

President Hugo Chávez has changed course in his attempt to change Venezuela's constitution by lifting a ban on successive presidential re-election. Now, he wants the same principle of successive re-election to apply to all other elected offices as well.

"This is going to mark the point of rupture with the old democracy," Chávez declared on Monday. The aim, he said, was to break with the old "liberal, classic" model of democracy.

Chávez was speaking at a meeting in Caracas of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he once hoped would take in all his supporters including members of smaller parties allied to his cause.

One of those parties, Patria Para Todos (PPT), has taken issue with the PSUV's plan for a referendum aimed solely at changing the clause which currently prevents successive presidential re-election. Without the hoped-for change, Chávez would have to stand down when his second, successive term ends in 2012. PPT has called for any change on presidential re-election to be extended to include any elected official rather than just the president. Until now, the PSUV has argued that this shouldn't be the case because the presidency is a special office and as such, different to, say, a state governor.

Just why Chávez has now chosen tacitly to accept PPT's argument remains unclear. One possibility is that he was concerned about provoking a complete split with PPT and other small parties over the re-election issue.

That said, he's shown no reluctance to have a falling out with PPT – or any of the other minnows, for that matter – and all the more so when they disagreed with the PSUV's choice of candidates for the regional elections last November. On one famous occasion, Chávez publicly told PPT and other dissident elements to get lost, predicting that they would be "pulverized" by the PSUV if they ran against his party at the elections. PPT and the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) did go up against the PSUV in the elections for governor in six states – and they duly lost. At state level, PPT now controls only Amazonas, the sole state not to hold an election last year.

Chávez has already split with the social democratic party, Podemos, which used to be the second largest party in the ruling coalition after the PSUV's predecessor, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR). That, too, was over Chavez' earlier attempt to remove the ban on presidential re-election. Podemos walked out of the coalition and into formal opposition, protesting that Chávez was trying to accumulate too much power into his own hands. The plan was defeated by a narrow margin of two percentage points in December 2007, and it's thought that Podemos may have made the difference.

A second reason for the shift to include other officials besides the presidency may also be that it puts the referendum on a slightly more legal footing, as it is not quite the same issue as was decided in 2007, when the term limit of the presidency was the only official term limit being constitutionally changed. Article 345 of the 1999 Constitution that Chavez helped draft states that "A revised constitutional reform initiative may not be submitted during the same constitutional term of office of the National Assembly."