Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Their true colors come shining through
Today, in a not very surprising move, the opposition electoral NGO, Sumate, announced that there almost certainly won’t be any primaries to choose an opponent to Chavez for the upcoming presidential elections. The reason given was that the parties involved couldn’t come to an agreement to hold primaries and there is no longer enough time to properly organize them.
To see the significance of this we first have to back up a little bit. There were three reasons that the opposition needed to hold primaries. First, there are three main opposition candidates, Teodoro Petkoff who is a newspaper publisher, Manuel Rosales who is the governor of Venezuela’s largest state, and Julio Borges who is the head of the Primero Justicia (Justice First) political party. To stand any chance against Chavez they can’t all run, they have to choose a unity candidate. The second reason why the opposition would want to hold primaries is to mobilize its base, debate a political platform, and show the country that it is a democratic force. The third reason for the opposition to choose a candidate via primaries is that it is required by the Venezuelan Constitution. According to the consitution all candidates for office are to be chosen through internal party elections.
In one fell swoop the opposition has now blown all of that out of the water. They are still stuck with three candidates and no way of deciding amongst them. The political grapevine has it that Petkoff and Rosales were opposed to primaries all along as they were afraid they would lose to Borges. This is not surprising as both of them are holdovers of the corrupt and anti-democratic pre-Chavez Fourth Republic and therefore have no use for things like internal party democracy.
It will also be interesting to see what the hyper-pedantic opposition sophists have to say about the primaries not being held. If the law is strictly adhered to none of these individuals should be permitted to participate in the elections as they don’t meet the requirement of having held primaries (the same goes for Chavez so if the CNE follows the law to the “T” they should cancel the elections for lack of qualified candidates). Fortunately for them in Venezuela laws tend not to be that strictly adhered to.
But the most important point in all of this it what is shows us about the nature of the Venezuelan opposition. For years now I have listened to opposition apologists explain how they had nothing to do with the corruption and repression of the previous governments. The opposition, they said, is composed of new, forward thinking people who had a vision for a new and better Venezuela. And part of this was presumably that the country would be more democratic if they came to power.
This certainly serves to show what non-sense all of that was. These people clearly don’t have a democratic bone in their body. In the seven long years they have been ranting and raving about how authoritarian Chavez supposedly is they’ve been able to organize how many internal elections? Zero. That’s right, not a single solitary one (damn, at least the Chavistas have had some primaries, if not enough). These clowns who ceaselessly claim they are the last hope to save Venezuelan democracy can’t even organize an election amongst themselves!!!
So here we have it clearly demonstrated – these people represent nothing new for Venezuelans. They are the exact same corrupt and anti-democratic slime that ruled over Venezuela for the forty years of “democracy” before Chavez came to power. They neither believe in nor respect average people – and they sure don’t think regular people should have anything to do with choosing the country’s leaders. Rather the opposition is of the elite, by the media barons, and for the rich. “The people” simply have no place in the Venezuelan opposition and are at best to be seen, but never heard.
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To see the significance of this we first have to back up a little bit. There were three reasons that the opposition needed to hold primaries. First, there are three main opposition candidates, Teodoro Petkoff who is a newspaper publisher, Manuel Rosales who is the governor of Venezuela’s largest state, and Julio Borges who is the head of the Primero Justicia (Justice First) political party. To stand any chance against Chavez they can’t all run, they have to choose a unity candidate. The second reason why the opposition would want to hold primaries is to mobilize its base, debate a political platform, and show the country that it is a democratic force. The third reason for the opposition to choose a candidate via primaries is that it is required by the Venezuelan Constitution. According to the consitution all candidates for office are to be chosen through internal party elections.
In one fell swoop the opposition has now blown all of that out of the water. They are still stuck with three candidates and no way of deciding amongst them. The political grapevine has it that Petkoff and Rosales were opposed to primaries all along as they were afraid they would lose to Borges. This is not surprising as both of them are holdovers of the corrupt and anti-democratic pre-Chavez Fourth Republic and therefore have no use for things like internal party democracy.
It will also be interesting to see what the hyper-pedantic opposition sophists have to say about the primaries not being held. If the law is strictly adhered to none of these individuals should be permitted to participate in the elections as they don’t meet the requirement of having held primaries (the same goes for Chavez so if the CNE follows the law to the “T” they should cancel the elections for lack of qualified candidates). Fortunately for them in Venezuela laws tend not to be that strictly adhered to.
But the most important point in all of this it what is shows us about the nature of the Venezuelan opposition. For years now I have listened to opposition apologists explain how they had nothing to do with the corruption and repression of the previous governments. The opposition, they said, is composed of new, forward thinking people who had a vision for a new and better Venezuela. And part of this was presumably that the country would be more democratic if they came to power.
This certainly serves to show what non-sense all of that was. These people clearly don’t have a democratic bone in their body. In the seven long years they have been ranting and raving about how authoritarian Chavez supposedly is they’ve been able to organize how many internal elections? Zero. That’s right, not a single solitary one (damn, at least the Chavistas have had some primaries, if not enough). These clowns who ceaselessly claim they are the last hope to save Venezuelan democracy can’t even organize an election amongst themselves!!!
So here we have it clearly demonstrated – these people represent nothing new for Venezuelans. They are the exact same corrupt and anti-democratic slime that ruled over Venezuela for the forty years of “democracy” before Chavez came to power. They neither believe in nor respect average people – and they sure don’t think regular people should have anything to do with choosing the country’s leaders. Rather the opposition is of the elite, by the media barons, and for the rich. “The people” simply have no place in the Venezuelan opposition and are at best to be seen, but never heard.
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