Venezuela's opposition has its best chance in years to build a challenge to President Hugo Chavez after wins in state elections over the weekend but needs to build a stronger national leadership and policy platform.
The opposition's strong showing in urban areas means its leaders can capitalize on frustration in shantytowns over Chavez allies' shoddy administration by showing they can tackle day-to-day problems such as crime and trash collection.
Success in tackling those issues would give opposition leaders a real chance at weakening Chavez, and killing off his hopes of extending his rule beyond 2013, when his current term ends. But a hodgepodge movement that includes student activists, technocrats and old-guard politicians will struggle to mount a threat to Chavez unless they unite behind a charismatic leader or a political project that rivals his socialist "revolution." Chavez, an anti-U.S. socialist who wants to rule for decades, is not afraid to weaken state government leaders by cutting off funds, using technicalities to keep them out of office, and appointing regional officials above them in the OPEC nation.
Chavez's allies won 17 of 22 states in a showing of his continued popularity, but opposition candidates made gains by taking five states and the OPEC nation's three largest cities that in all hold about half the country's registered voters. "Starting right now, we have to move from being an anti-(Chavez) opposition to becoming a 'pro-' movement that has a positive attitude building a better future for Venezuela from the center and not from the extremes," said Leopoldo Lopez, a young star of the opposition who was sidelined from running on Sunday by the legal maneuvers of Chavez's allies. "We should not be confrontational but aim to bring people together in the center," he said.
The opposition aims to demonstrate competent management in chaotic ramshackle slums where overflowing sewers, mountains of trash and freewheeling gangsters have taken the shine off Chavez's Midas touch among the poor. And the new leaders have to avoid letting national politics distract from the need for progress on day-to-day issues, a trap that has snared Chavez as grandiose visions of revolution overshadow basic issues such as adequate municipal services.
BACK TO BREAD-AND-BUTTER
Sunday's vote extended the opposition's ballot-box momentum. Last December, they defeated Chavez in a referendum on reforms that would have expanded his powers. The wins have revived an opposition whose traditional parties were pushed aside when Chavez took office in 1999 and beaten down by repeated blunders including a failed coup in 2002, a grueling two-month oil strike and election boycotts in 2004 and 2005.
Falling energy prices threaten to derail Chavez's oil-financed social programs that bolster his popularity ratings as he renews a push for reforms allowing him to run for reelection. But the opposition remains dispersed, with no single party carrying more than one state in Sunday's elections and little organizational capacity to match Chavez's well-greased get-out-the-vote machine that reaches even the most remote urban slums and rural backwaters. Just as it stopped Lopez this time, the government has said it may block rivals from running in the future, and Chavez has vowed to jail opposition leader Manuel Rosales.
Chavez can also pressure rival governors who rely heavily on the central government's distribution of oil income. He has moved to emasculate the opposition in power. In recent months, he stripped Caracas' hospitals and police force from the mayor's responsibilities and decreed that he can pick local officials that could supplant the work of rivals. "Venezuela has a highly centralized political system in which governors and mayors play a very marginal role," said Patrick Esteruelas of the Eurasia Group in New York. "The opposition has won visibility and it was won presence, but it has not won power."
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