The BBC World Service reached out for my thoughts on yesterday’s indefinite re-election vote. There’s no need to repeat them here. What I will say, echoing Daniel’s perspective, is that 54% of Venezuelans have decided that Hugo Chávez‘s political style is legitimate, representative, and worthy of continuation. There’s little to argue against that. I anticipated this outcome; in fact, I wrote about it on Miguel’s blog a month before the vote:
Miguel, the strategy is brilliantly simple in my view: in the land of the caudillo, let there be all. Chávez can be critiqued for many things, but not for lacking an excellent understanding of Venezuelan identity.
Chávez lost in 2007 because he went against the bureaucrats and military of his party. This time, he ensured that the possibility of indefinite re-election extended to almost all elected officials, and the results speak for themselves. This time, chavismo did mobilize the people and achieved the necessary majority. Moreover, this electoral outcome reaffirms my hypothesis that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the students who tipped the scales last time.
However, what is evidently clear is that those election observers who deemed the elections “free and fair” have a very poor understanding of what democracy entails. As the international community becomes increasingly aware of Chávez’s many abuses, most of my compatriots have no qualms about granting a blank check to the “standard autocrat.”