Venezuelan referendum result

A quick initial reaction to the result of the Venezuelan referendum referred to in my last post.

I find myself, surprisingly, not particularly disheartened by the government's defeat. I said at the weekend that, on balance, I supported the reforms. On reflection (a reflection I hope I would still have taken had the government won) that's a hard statement to make meaningfully on such a broad package. How can you say "yes" or "no" to 60plus proposals at once? There are elements of the package that I'm sorry to see will not be passed into law for now. Prohibition of discrimination against homosexuals for example. There are other elements that I'm rather glad to see defeated - e.g. some of the extra powers for the Presidency.

For me, the main thing as far as the vote was concerned was its impact on the general health of Venezuelan democracy and of the overall reform agenda pursued by the government over the last nine years. More specifically, I was concerned as to whether the outcome would strengthen the Venezuelan opposition.

Early indications are that the government's defeat on Sunday was largely a result of abstentions from its own supporters. Overall turnout was down sharply from the normal level. It appears that opposition support remains more or less flatlined at about a third of the overall electorate, where it has been through its preceding 11 successive election defeats. 51 per cent of a turnout of 55 means that the opposition could only mobilise just over a quarter of Venezuelan voters to do something about the coming "dictatorship" (I found myself laughing out loud on Sunday as an opposition spokeswoman interviewed by Channel 4 tv news told the reporter that Venezuelan democracy was dead....while standing outside a polling station). To the extent that I was more concerned about the opposition winning than the government losing, that's encouraging news.

If its true that the government lost because its own supporters stayed at home, rather than because the opposition persuaded people to vote against the proposals, then the government will have to look into why this happened and take account of those views. Intuitively, I would expect that traditional Bolivarians will have abstained due to disquiet about the centralising aspects of the new constitution. If that persuades Chavez to forget about measures like ending Presidential term limits, for example, then that's all to the good. As Rahul Mahajan says in a good piece here, "15 years in power ought to be enough for Chavez; a revolution that requires him for longer than that isn’t much of a revolution".

If this analysis is correct then in many ways its very good news. The "Bolivarian Revolution" is born of a broad socio-political movement that President Chavez happens to stand at the front of. Claims that the Chavez is implementing a "self-styled" revolution ignore this fact, and should be understood as part of a drive by Western opinion formers to shape our understanding of Venezuelan politics purely in terms of (their caricature of) Chavez's personality, thus obscuring both the active popular basis of Bolivarianism and the substance of what the Caracas government has been doing in terms of social reform and international diplomacy since 1999. One might well interpret the decision of traditional Bolivarians to stay at home - if indeed that was to do with proposed centralisation - as a reminder to the government they put in power that ownership of Bolivarianism should remain with the public. If that's correct, once can only applaud the result, particularly if any gains for the opposition are minimal, as appears to be the case.

All the above is of course subject to a fuller understanding of the data. If I find anything substantial and reliable I'll link to it as an update to this post.

One more thing: as I mentioned at the weekend, there were some indications to suggest that a government victory would have been disputed deliberately as a tactic to destabilise the country and prepare the ground for a possible coup. A coup is after all the only way the broad leftward trend in Venezuela is likely to be stopped. An opposition victory precludes the possibility of that course of action being taken and of a violent return to the status quo ante. Instead, Venezuela remains as Bolivarian as it was on Saturday evening, as far as I can see. When opposition supporters (and certain western foreign correspondents) recover from their hangovers, that's the reality they'll have to face.

So all in all, I can't feel too sorry about the result. Bolivarianism goes on, perhaps even in a new and improved form now that the people have spoken in Chavez's alleged "dictatorship".

For more about Venezuela, see here and here.