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Chavism prevails against fractured Venezuela oppn

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Caracas: A landslide win in regional elections against a fractured opposition shows that the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro prevails in Venezuela despite an economy in shreds and months of protests, analysts said.


Analysts point to the left’s powerful ability to mobilize its voter base, helped by opposition abstentionism and dirty tricks denounced as illegal by the opposition.


But how does Chavism — the name for the leftist ideology and government style of late president Hugo Chavez — continue to prevail when its chief exponent, Maduro, has an 80 per cent dissatisfaction rating and the country has become an economic wasteland.


Political analyst Luis Vicente Leon said that the government’s 54 per cent overall share of the vote in Sunday’s poll represents a bedrock of support of about 32 per cent of the electorate.


“Chavistas unified to protect themselves. They faced a fractured and discouraged opposition,” he said, referring to the failure of anti-Maduro street protests that between April and July claimed the lives of 125 people.


Those protests waned amid food and medicine shortages, exhaustion, and street frustration over an increasingly fractured opposition leadership.


In Petare, Venezuela’s largest favela in Miranda state, a sudden surge of support for the government ousted governor Henrique Capriles, a former presidential candidate and a standard bearer for the right-wing opposition.


The government took 18 governorships in all. The opposition, which had been tipped to win as many as 18, won only five, and cried foul over dirty tricks which included the last-minute relocation of 274 polling stations from pro-opposition areas.


Jose Yanezl, a 72-year-old who lives with his sister in a hut with a metal roof, doesn’t blame Chavism for Venezuela’s crippling shortages. “It’s not Maduro’s fault if a kilo of sugar costs 27,000 bolivars” (eight dollars at the official rate), he said.


For him the culprit is the opposition, who became “accomplices in the economic war” by monopolizing household staples to cause shortages and speculation.


Explaining his support for Chavism he said: “In what country in the world does a government build 1.8 million houses for the poorest people.”


“We are hungry, sometimes we only eat one meal a day, but we continue to resist because of the good man,” he said, referring to Chavez, who died in 2013 after handpicking Maduro as his successor. “He knew how to give love and the poor recognize it. I will remain a Chavista till I die.”


Cristobal Ramirez, wearing a red T-shirt with Maduro’s image, said he had once thought of voting for the opposition, but quickly changed his mind. “I never heard them speak to the poor. If they treat us badly without being in government, what would they do if they won — They would kill us.”


“While they (the opposition) hide the food from us, the government is reaching out to us with food,” said Ramirez, 67, referring to food cartons at subsidized prices.


Sunday’s vote drew the ire of the world powers including the United States, which said it was neither free nor fair.


But veteran opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup said the opposition Democratic Union Roundtable (MUD) was also “terribly affected” by absentee voters among its support base. — AFP


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