Translated material
Mathematics against dictatorship
Venezuelans did not agree to a third term for Chavez
The charismatic leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez - Comandante Cha - suffered an unexpected and most painful defeat as president of the country. The majority of Venezuelans did not support his proposed constitutional amendments in Sunday's referendum , thereby calling into question his right to speak on behalf of the entire people. The people who will be most happy about Chavez's defeat are the United States, where the Venezuelan leader has long been considered an enemy of freedom and democracy.According to preliminary data released yesterday by the Venezuelan National Electoral Council, the opinions of opponents and supporters of changing the country's basic law were almost equally divided. However, there were still more who said “no”. The reform project, which consisted of 69 amendments, received the support of 49.29% of voters. “No” was said by 50.7% of the plebiscite participants. And millions of citizens generally showed indifference to the fate of the constitution. In Venezuela, a population of 26 million, more than 16 million people have the right to vote. Just over 9 million went to the polls on Sunday.
Having admitted the defeat of the reform he initiated, Hugo Chavez still did not give up hopes of changing the constitution adopted in 1999. “I will not remove a single comma from the reform project. I continue to address the people of Venezuela. This project is alive, it is not dead. Now we couldn’t, but I remain hopeful,” the Comandante said on Venezuelan television. He called the voting results a “mathematical” victory for the opposition.
The constitutional reform project, which 53-year-old Chavez worked on for almost a year, consisted of political, economic and social blocks. More than 300 articles of the country's basic law were subject to changes. The Comandante personally developed 33 amendments, and the parliament that approved them introduced 36 more.
The amendments, in particular, dealt with extending the term of presidential rule from six to seven years and granting the current head of state the right to participate in presidential elections an unlimited number of times. For Chavez, who has been in power since 1998 and was planning a third consecutive election in 2012, accepting the changes would pave the way for lifelong rule.
The proposed amendments also gave the country's authorities the right to nationalize large private land plots, introduced new types of property - cooperative and public - and proposed to take the Central Bank under government control. Other changes concerned the areas of education, healthcare, and pensions.
However, the Venezuelan opposition, represented primarily by the student movement, broke Chavez's ambitious plans. “Student leaders whom no one knew about three months ago—Jon Goicoechea, Stalin Gonzalez, Freddy Guevara—managed to organize gigantic protest marches that became the people’s thermometer of attitudes toward constitutional reform,” wrote the Venezuelan newspaper Diario El Tiempo. . The tempting clause for ordinary Venezuelans about reducing the working day to six hours did not help the commandant either.
The results of the referendum have already been positively assessed in the USA, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. The official representative of the European Commission, Amadeu Altafaj, noted that his organization was “satisfied” with the results, as well as with the fact that the voting took place in an atmosphere of “patriotism and mutual respect.”
In Russia, Konstantin Kosachev, head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, was one of the first to respond to the situation in Venezuela. According to him, the result shows “the unwillingness of a significant part of the Venezuelan population to increase the degree of confrontation in relations with the outside world, including the United States.” For Chavez, this must be a “subject of reflection” if he wants to “retain the support of the majority.”
Vremya Novostei experts expressed similar opinions. “I think Chavez, confident of absolute popular support, will cool down. The voting results are not a defeat, but they will force him to pursue a more balanced policy and abandon populist statements in the spirit of “and we will stop giving oil to America,” Vadim Teperman, deputy director of the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostey. about Chavez's recent scandalous actions: the November incident at the Ibero-American Summit, where the Comandante actually provoked the King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, with the phrase "Why don't you shut up?" - and the President’s recently announced severance of relations with the Colombian government: “All this was nothing more than political rhetoric on the eve of the referendum.”
Director of the International Center for Socio-Political Research Yevgeny Pashentsev named “insufficient unity of Chavez’s supporters and the Venezuelan President’s overestimation of his own strengths” among the reasons for the failure of the constitutional reform. “This allowed the opposition to turn the situation in their favor,” he said. Nevertheless, he said, “Chavez, as a charismatic and pragmatic leader, still remains in power. And he has a strong position - in the army, in the government apparatus, among certain segments of the population.” Mr. Pashentsev predicts that the Venezuelan president will again try to change the constitution: “If the economic situation and the international situation are favorable, a repeat of the referendum is possible, but with a softening of some positions.”
Vadim Teperman is less optimistic about the political future of Hugo Chavez. He believes that the Venezuelan president will now prepare a successor for the 2012 elections: “He has more than enough time, but it is still difficult to talk about specific figures.”