http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/world/americas/venezuela-presidential-election.html?pagewanted=all
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez, long a fiery foe of
Washington, won re-election on Sunday, facing down cancer and the strongest
electoral challenge of his nearly 14 years in office and gaining a new mandate
to deepen his socialist revolution.
Though his margin of victory was much narrower than in past
elections, he still won handily. With 90 percent of the votes tallied, Mr.
Chávez received 54 percent, to 45 percent for his opponent, Henrique Capriles
Radonski, the national election council said. Fireworks erupted in Caracas
after the news, and Chávez supporters celebrated in the streets.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. local time, Mr. Chávez stepped out
onto the balcony of the presidential palace in Caracas and waved to a sea of
jubilant supporters. “My words of recognition go out from here to all who voted
against us, a recognition for their democratic temperament,” he said. A former
soldier, he called the election a “perfect battle.”
Still, after a spirited campaign, the polarizing Mr. Chávez
finds himself governing a changed country. He is an ailing and politically
weakened winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more
confident as the voting neared, and held out hope that an upset victory was
within reach.
Mr. Chávez has said that he would move forward even more
aggressively to create his version of socialism in Venezuela in a new six-year
term, although his pledges were short on specifics.
His health, though, remains a question mark. He has
undergone several rounds of treatment for cancer in the last 15 months, but has
refused to make public essential details of his illness. If he overcomes the
disease and serves out his new term to its end in 2019, he will have been in
power for two full decades.
Toward the end of the campaign, facing pressure from Mr.
Capriles, he pledged to make his government more efficient and to pay more
attention to the quality of government programs like education. He even made
appeals for the middle class and the opposition to join in his revolution.
But Mr. Chávez spent much of the year insulting and trying
to provoke Mr. Capriles and his followers. And on Sunday night, he had to face
the fact that the people he taunted as squalid good-for-nothings, little
Yankees and fascists, turned out to be nearly half the electorate.
As the opposition’s momentum grew, Mr. Chávez’s insults
seemed to lose their sting. By the end of the campaign, young people in Caracas
were wearing colorful T-shirts that said “majunche” or good-for-nothing, Mr.
Chávez’s favorite taunt.
Mr. Capriles was subdued on Sunday night, congratulating Mr.
Chávez and saying he hoped the president would see the result as “the
expression today of a country with two visions, and to be president means
working to solve the problems of all Venezuelans.”
He appeared poised to carry on his fight in the elections
for state governors in December. “You should all feel proud, do not feel
defeated,” he told supporters.
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a
research institute in Washington, called the presidential election “a
fundamental turning point.” He said Mr. Chávez was “going to have to deal with
a very different society than he dealt with in his last term, a society that’s
awakened and more organized and more confident.”
Even so, the opposition is a fragile coalition with a
history of destructive infighting, especially after an election defeat. Mr.
Capriles will have to keep this fractious amalgam of parties from the left,
right and center together in order to take advantage of the new ground they
have gained.
“The opposition has more power, it feels more support,” said
Elsi Fernandes, a schoolteacher, who voted for Mr. Capriles on Sunday morning
in Catia, a poor neighborhood in Caracas. “The difference is that we’re not
going to stay with our arms crossed.”
The turnout was more than 80 percent, the highest in
decades, the election council said. People stood in line for hours, although
the voting appeared in most cases to run smoothly.
Venezuela uses a touch-screen electronic voting system, and
voters are identified with a digital thumbprint reader; technical problems at
some polling places caused long delays and, in some, a resort to backup paper
ballots. Polling places were told to keep working until everyone in line at
closing time had a chance to vote.
Venezuela is mired in problems, including out-of-control
violent crime, crumbling roads and bridges, and power blackouts that regularly
plague much of the country outside the capital. Oil production, the country’s
mainstay, has plateaued in recent years, and other exports have not picked up
the slack. The overall economy grew this year, largely because of a huge
pre-election boost in government spending, but clouds loom. A devaluation of
the Venezuelan currency, the bolívar, is widely seen as inevitable, and
inflation remains stubbornly high.
Mr. Chávez has trumpeted his programs to help the poor, and
has pointed to a sharp reduction in the number of people living in poverty. But
he has governed during a phenomenal rise in oil prices, which have soared from
$10 in 1998, the year before he took office, to more than $100 in recent years
and the high $80s now, pouring huge amounts of revenue into Venezuela. Mr.
Capriles, who has served as a legislator, mayor and governor, campaigned almost
nonstop, seeking to contrast his energetic style with the reduced schedule of
Mr. Chávez, who received a diagnosis of cancer in 2011.
Mr. Chávez has kept most details of his condition secret,
refusing to say exactly what kind of cancer he has or where in his body it is.
He received chemotherapy last summer after an operation to remove a tumor, but
the cancer returned and he had another operation in February, followed by
radiation therapy. The operations and treatments were performed in Cuba, taking
Mr. Chávez out of Venezuela for extended periods.
His health, and whether he was well enough to serve a new
six-year term, always loomed over the campaign, but it receded as an issue as
Mr. Chávez gradually increased his public appearances. Still, he never threw himself
into campaigning at the frenzied pace of Mr. Capriles.
Opposition to Mr. Chávez has long been divided and easily
manipulated by Mr. Chávez, a master politician who kept his rivals off balance.
Mr. Capriles changed that. He crisscrossed the country, campaigning in places
long considered bastions of support for Mr. Chávez, including urban slums and
poor rural areas. He told voters that he was the future and Mr. Chávez the
past.
Mr. Chávez dismissed Mr. Capriles as an unworthy opponent,
accusing him of lying about wanting to continue Mr. Chávez’s social programs.
He called Mr. Capriles a right-wing oligarch in disguise who sought to bring
back the bad old days of rule by the rich. In Catia, María Elena Severine, 59,
who works as a cleaner in a bank, said that Mr. Chávez was still as fresh a
candidate as when he first ran in 1998. She lives in a rental apartment but
hopes someday to be given a new home government-built home.
“I like my president,” she said. “He is the revolution. He
is change.”
No comments:
Post a Comment