Now public attention turns to the handful of men who lead the anti-Chavez bandwagon, known by the awkward title of Democratic Coordinator, or CD. Political analysts are asking whether the CD’s leaders are capable of overcoming their internal divisions and ousting a weakened but charismatic president. Should they formulate a specific governing platform of their own? Will opposition supporters, many of whom distrust their own leaders as much as they dislike Chavez, show up to vote in sufficient numbers? And, perhaps most important, who will rule Venezuela, and how, if Chavez is voted out?
The lack of a leader who appeals to the masses is the opposition’s greatest vulnerability. “The most important enemy for the opposition is not Chavez,” says Datanalisis pollster Luis Vicente Leon. “It’s abstention.” According to his firm’s most recent figures, almost 60 percent of the country’s 13 million registered voters say they oppose Chavez. To revoke the president’s mandate–which would be an unprecedented event in Latin America–the alliance must receive at least one vote more than the almost 3.8 million cast for Chavez in the 2000 election. Though the CD has what Leon terms “an excellent base” of about 3.4 million committed voters, it must also mobilize the large, so-called neither/nor segment of the population, who are skeptical of both sides.
The opposition coalition is held together almost exclusively by its members’ dislike of Chavez. The group has regularly promised to unveil its own policy platform, and regularly failed to do so. The president has taken advantage of this political vacuum to supply the answer himself. The opposition leadership, he declares, is a group of “fascist, terrorist coup plotters” who obey “foreign masters” (a none-too-veiled reference to George W. Bush). Their program is–according to this version–starkly simple: they want to privatize everything, end social programs and hand the country over to multinational corporations.
In fact, the Democratic Coordinator is a multifaceted organization as unwieldy as its name. It consists of 25 political parties–from the leftist ex-guerrillas of the Red Flag movement to the free-market conservatives of Project Venezuela–and almost as many nonparty pressure groups, not to mention the country’s main labor confederation and the business chamber Fedecamaras. Its most prominent leader is Enrique Mendoza, an independent Christian Democrat and governor of the strategic state of Miranda, which embraces part of the capital, Caracas. Mendoza is among the three or four opposition leaders with enough voter support to contemplate a presidential bid. Others include Julio Borges, the youthful leader of the four-year-old Justice First party, and Henrique Salas Romer of Project Venezuela, who lost to Chavez in 1998. But none can hold a candle to the president in terms of voter appeal in a straight fight. “The gap between the opposition leaders and Chavez is immense,” says pollster Leon.
They face other hurdles: the government controls the issuing of identity cards (essential for voting) and holds a financial stake in the firm providing the software for new, untried touch-screen voting machines. And with Venezuelan oil at more than $30 a barrel, Chavez won’t be strapped for campaign cash.
Then “there is the subject matter of personal ambitions,” says Borges. He’s optimistic that a government of national unity–“in which even the chavistas [the president’s followers] will be represented”–will be formed if the opposition wins. He stresses the need for national reconciliation (not a popular topic among diehard opposition supporters) and cheerfully declares that, if necessary, he would sit the next election out. “Thank God that, biologically, my prospects are not so limited,” the 32-year-old says with a grin. They could be, actually, if the alliance doesn’t get its supporters to the polls in August.
