Hugo’s reality check

When people vote against a referendum that would cut their maximum working day from eight hours to six, you know that there must have been something else on the menu that left them unenthused. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, has lost — extremely narrowly — a vote that, among other constitutional reforms, would have allowed him to bid to be re-elected as president a second time. Chavez, as his numerous fans in the Left worldwide know, is not a man used to defeat. No wonder his words of graceful concession, “for now, we couldn’t do it,” harked back to 1992. Those are the words he had uttered then, when his attempt to gain power in Venezuela in a coup failed. Chavez saw the referendum as a way of moving forward his “socialist revolution”, but the question of the moment is: if he lost, who won?

To answer that question, consider Venezuela’s peculiar polity. The opposition is in disarray, and the campaign against the referendum was led more by students than politicians. Chavez’s re-election as president less than a year ago was all the more sweeping because there was no one person who was seen as a winning alternative. But, realising that a referendum is a different thing, that to defeat his proposals voters do not have to consider an alternative, he invoked an opponent: the American president. “Who votes yes is for Chavez,” he said during the campaign. “Who votes no is voting for George W. Bush.”

Chavez, the strongman of the Left who wins supporters by his air of invincibility, must be shattered. Chavez’s way has been to use Venezuela’s considerable revenues from oil to finance populist schemes that would otherwise have been uneconomic, especially given his steadfast pursuit of nationalisation. He has given this “socialist revolution” an ideological fervour by stirring anti-Americanism. Last year he went to the UN a day after Bush, saying he could still smell sulphur left behind by “the devil”. Wonder if “the devil”, in his last dreary months in the White House, wears a smile today.