Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has lost his referendum. The margin was narrow—51 percent to 49 percent—and the turnout low—about 56 percent—but he has lost nonetheless. The U.S. media, adopting its usual non-judgmental tone towards the advance of tyranny abroad, often referred to the referendum as being on “constitutional reform,” but if Chavez was a reformer, then so are his friends Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The referendum threw a series of socio-economic bones to the poor, but at its heart was an attempt to rig the Venezuelan political system and allow Chavez to run for President indefinitely. If—and that is a very big if indeed—he abides by the results of the referendum, Chavez will now be barred from running again in 2012.
2012 is a very long way away. If a week is an eternity in politics, five years is a much longer eternity. Chavez is unlikely to be discouraged by his narrow loss: the only wonder is that he did not cheat more effectively this time round. His “victory” in the 2004 recall referendum was certified by almost no one except Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Chavez put so many restrictions in their way that the EU refused even to oversee the vote.
Sunday’s vote is a victory for democracy, in a part of the world where it is particularly embattled, but it is not even the end of the beginning of the struggle. Chavez is still popular, and not just among his cronies and henchmen: his left-wing populism, economically destructive and politically illiberal though it is, is an authentic part—though not the only part—of Latin American political culture. The price of oil continues to rise, which gives him a nuisance-making power immensely larger than his politics or the rest of the Venezuelan economy merits. He continues to consort with his fellow oil dictators, and to proclaim the necessity of an anti-American alliance, one based, like the Anti-Commintern Pact, solely on their shared hatreds. Sophisticated people laughed about the axis of evil: Chavez is proud to proclaim that he’s part of it. And we have to put democracy’s victory in Latin America alongside Putin’s simultaneous triumph in a very similar campaign.
But we can take a couple of lessons away from Venezuela. The first is that, while elections are not a cure-all, and while undemocratic parties can indeed triumph through the polls, there is no path to democracy that does not run through them. And sometimes, we get more out of supporting elections than we expect we will. The second is that our cause has more friends than we sometimes realize. Chavez is an incipient dictator, but the Venezuelan people are not unreservedly on his side. The dictator states always look strong until, as in 1989, they crack, fall, and disappear into the dustbin of history. The most important thing in thinking about such states is always to remember what they are, and never to mistake the silence of the people for their support.
