Saturday, October 07, 2006
From bad to worse for the opposition
Just when you thought things couldn't get much worse for the Venezuelan opposition, they did. Today they attempted to mount a large rally in Caracas to kickstart their to-date moribund campaign which has them trailing Chavez anywheres from 20 to 30 points. Unfortunately for them, it flopped. Here is a picture of the sad spectacle:
Clearly, it was sparsely attended. Associated Press reporters estimated a turn out of 10,000 people. I'll be a little more generous, from the picture maybe it was 15,000. Suffice it to say, Shakira can get a lot more people to show up to an expensive concert than these people can get to a free rally!
So bad was the debacle that their web-sites had to put up pictures of old rallies to cover this failure. Next maybe they'll be blaming the low turnout on the big tourism expo being held in Caracas (and to which people have had to wait in lines of up to five hours just to get in).
To only get ten or twenty thousand people to turnout in what is indisputably the oppositions main strong hold is a huge failure. With the refusal of Rosales poll numbers to budge and now this their campaign team is probably huddled tonight trying to figure out what to do next. The downside is that they may well conclude they have no hope of avoiding a thorough drubbing at the polls and simply go back to the "fraud" excuse for pulling out of the elections altogether. They are definitely between a rock and a hard place.
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Clearly, it was sparsely attended. Associated Press reporters estimated a turn out of 10,000 people. I'll be a little more generous, from the picture maybe it was 15,000. Suffice it to say, Shakira can get a lot more people to show up to an expensive concert than these people can get to a free rally!
So bad was the debacle that their web-sites had to put up pictures of old rallies to cover this failure. Next maybe they'll be blaming the low turnout on the big tourism expo being held in Caracas (and to which people have had to wait in lines of up to five hours just to get in).
To only get ten or twenty thousand people to turnout in what is indisputably the oppositions main strong hold is a huge failure. With the refusal of Rosales poll numbers to budge and now this their campaign team is probably huddled tonight trying to figure out what to do next. The downside is that they may well conclude they have no hope of avoiding a thorough drubbing at the polls and simply go back to the "fraud" excuse for pulling out of the elections altogether. They are definitely between a rock and a hard place.
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