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Benjamin Melançon's Reporter's Notebook

 

Venezuela Votes; Elites Choose Anti-Democracy Path

Posted by Benjamin Melançon - December 5, 2005 at 3:27 pm
The opposition parties, including the two which used to alternate in power in Venezuela, found themselves bound for defeat, and withdrew to try to make the elections appear illegitimate.  There is nothing but their own withdrawal to support this contention. AP and Bloomberg reported turnout at 25% but Vheadline.com calls this the opposition number and real turnout is probably higher, but still around a third of the voting-age population.  The BBC was one of the few outlets to suggest the obvious point that  all those who did not vote didn't support the opposition, but didn't see a need to vote since Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement party was guaranteed to win, with the opposition parties pulling their support for their own candidates.

Most in the United States, especially the poor, have been voting at dismally low levels, especially for congressional elections like this, for decades, and no demand for the overthrow of the government and foreign assistance to do so ever gained currency in any media.  Not even Soviet, that I'm aware of.

Charlie Hardy told us to watch these elections.  He also said that the opposition could have won a few seats in certain areas, with concentrations of the wealthier or where they had good candidates.  By boycotting the elections, the elites the opposition parties represent have chosen an anti-democracy path.  The will not make their points in a minority in congress and try to win over voters in later elections.  They are laying the groundwork for a violent attack on Venezuela's duly elected, popular government.  I don't think they would do this without a wink and a nod, to say nothing of millions of dollars, from the Bush regime.

For now, the U.S. press generally acknowledged the legitimacy of the elections, but highlighted the opposition boycott (though noting the opposition was behind in the polls).  They also used phrasing such as 'tightened his grip on power' that they would never use to describe, say, the Bush regime's takeover of all three branches of government.  The media, too, is laying the groundwork for the 'international community' to work to take down the Bolivarian Republic.

But this is a victory for the movement Hugo Chavez has led, another fair election won overwhelmingly.  And because this is a time of victory, and the attack by the rich has not begun in earnest, I want to take the opportunity to push the Venezuelan government to do even more than be more legitimate than probably any government on teh planet.  Because we need more than the winner-take-all, elected-representative democracy version of legitimacy.

Saying Venezuela got as good turnout as the United States or the European Union in these parliamentary elections simply isn't good enough, from the vantage point of someone who looks to Latin America for new models of authentic democracy, and who wants the people of Venezuela to be able to fully capitalize on a government that, for a change, is truly theirs.

People in Venezuela do not seem to have formed a close relationship with their elected members to Congress, though things could hardly be worse than the United States where many do not know their Congress-person's name, and most elections are effectively uncontested.  But uncontested elections are simply bad for democracy.  Democracy activists in the United States have been promoting proportional representation as more democratic, and there are other ideas to get millions more power over the decisions that affect them.  I urge Chavez and the party he leads to use their significantly increased power not just to improve the lot of Venezuelans, but to increasingly democratize power itself.

[Sorry no links, written during work hours.]

About Benjamin Melançon

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Student-on-hold, ex-stocker and failed union agitator, ex-white-collar consultant and now co-founder and developer at Agaric Design Collective, making web sites with open source free software.

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Comments

Must-read analysis of Venezuela election

Submitted December 7, 2005 - 1:32 pm by Dan Feder
There is a pitch-perfect analysis of the elections by Bill Van Auken of the World Socialist Web Site, at this link. An excerpt:

With predictable brazenness, the US State Department on Monday questioned, on grounds of a low turnout, the legitimacy of Sunday’s legislative elections in Venezuela. But, as the US government is well aware, the low vote total was caused in large part by a boycott and sabotage campaign mounted by right-wing opposition parties that Washington supports, both politically and financially.

…

Vice President José Vicente Rangel added, “There are countries like the US in which only 25 percent participate in the elections to Congress,” while no one in Washington questions the elections’ legitimacy.

The decision not to run for a legislature that will be in office for the next five years appears, on the surface, to be an act of political suicide by the opposition—principally the discredited parties of the corrupt system in place in the half-century leading up to 1998, Acción Democrática and COPEI, as well as the newly founded Justice First, which portrayed itself as a party of free market technocrats.

In reality, it is only the latest gambit in a series of desperate political maneuvers aimed at overturning Chávez by extra-constitutional means. These have included the abortive US-backed coup in April 2002, which was defeated by a popular uprising, the 2002-2003 oil bosses’ strike, and the 2004 referendum.

By purposely ceding any representation in the National Assembly, the opposition is taking a self-declared path of “extra-parliamentary” opposition, whose methods and program it has yet to spell out. It is clear, however, that the strategy this layer is pursuing is aimed at provoking a US intervention to restore them to power.

Also, an interesting interpretation of the turnout numbers appears in Jeff Axel’s Oil Wars blog:

In the U.S. congressional elections we saw 37% of the electorate on average votes whereas in the just concluded N.A. election there was a turn out of 25%. But there is a huge difference. Almost all U.S. congressional contests there are two parties contesting the vote and they split the votes. Lets assume that in the U.S. the average voting pattern in Congressional races is 60% for the winner to 40% for the loser. That means the winning candidate, on average, got 60% of the votes from the 37% of the electorate that bothered to vote giving the percentage of the electorate that voted for the winner as 22.2% (37% x 60%). By contrast, in the Venezuelan contest the pro-Chavez candidates got virtually 100% of the vote as the opposition pulled out. That means that the percentage of the electorate that voted for the winning candiate was 25% (100% x the 25% of the electorate that bothered to vote). So, the average member of the Venezuelan Assembly had a higher percentage of his consituants vote for him than did the average member of the U.S. congress elected in similiar elections (25% for the Venenezuelans versus 22.2% for the U.S.).

O'Donoguhue claims EU, OAS unhappy with voting

Submitted December 10, 2005 - 6:48 pm by Benjamin Melançon
Patrick J. O'Donoghue wrote an article for VHeadline.com, "EU and OAS preliminary reports reveal serious deficiencies in voting procedures" which claimed the preliminary statements of the EU delegation found problems with last Sunday's vote.

I e-mailed to ask for clarification, and he never responded to my concerns or request for documentation, below for posterity.

Dear Patrick J. O'Donoghue,

The headline to your article reads "EU and OAS preliminary reports reveal serious deficiencies in voting procedures," but the short report mentions deficiencies that sound more minor than serious (but then I may be biased, I live in the United States).  Every fact is then presented in its most negative light; staying open isn't a possible compensation for difficulty voting, instead 'The closure hour, observers state, created difficulties and uncertainties'

Jose Albino Silva Peneda, while the president of the mission, is of a centre-right party in Portugal and Europe, and this fact may bear mentioning as he has more chance to slant a preliminary report than the mission's full report.

I would be interested in the source documents for your article.

Thank you,

Benjamin Melançon

Jose Albino Silva Peneda...

Submitted December 10, 2005 - 9:44 pm by Dan Feder
More specifically, Jose Albino Silva Peneda is active in several parties from the Centrist Democrat International, the main global Christian Democrat Organization. COPEI, one of the biggest Venezuelan opposition parties (and one that was implicated in the 2002 coup) is also a member of that international. Erich Moncada wrote a bit about the “Christian Democrat connection” in his piece for Narco News last month.

So, Silva Peneda has at the very least a natural ideological connection to one of the leading groups trying to claim this election is invalid.

But this article on Venezuelanalysis.com highlights several positive aspects of the EU mission’s findings. For instance, I wonder why VHeadline focuses on the OAS’ concerns on voter secrecy without mentioning that the EU report said that “endangerment of the secrecy of the vote was evaluated by EU EOM experts as remote.”

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