(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-03 10:05

Caracas -- Congress passed President Hugo Chavez's proposal to scrap presidential term limits on Friday in a package of constitutional changes that Venezuelans are likely to approve in a referendum next month.

Supporters of President Hugo Chavez celebrate outside Venezuelan National Assembly in Caracas November 2, 2007. [Agencies]

Pro-Chavez lawmakers shouted "yes, yes," and chanted the president's political slogan "Fatherland, socialism or death" in approving the measures.

The amendment includes the indefinite presidential re-election, the extension of the presidential period from six to seven years, a decrease in the Central Bank's autonomy, a territorial realignment and the army's change of name.

The reform plan would also widen the president's decision-making powers regarding military affairs, national reserves and monetary policy.

Chavez's supporters in Congress said the package addressed the needs of poor people that governments before Chavez had neglected for decades.

But the opposition have denounced the scores of proposed changes to the constitution as an authoritarian power grab by a man who has vowed to rule for decades.

With only a month available for a debate on the measures, the president easily should win a vote that mainly will be a reflection of his popularity among the majority poor who benefit from his spending of the OPEC nation's oil bonanza on clinics, schools and food subsidies, pollsters say.

Chavez, Castro and Collectives

The referendum package introduces new legal concepts such as "social property" and "collective property," promoting them above individual interests as part of a constitutional goal of creating a socialist economy.

Without the law change, the man who calls Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor would leave office in 2013.

Chavez, who has been in power since 1999, won a landslide re-election last December and says he needs more time to create a socialist state that can help counter "US imperialism."

Wall Street economists fear that as he campaigns for the referendum he will increase spending in a nation where rampant inflation is a sign the economy is overheating with periodic shortages in staples such as milk.

In recent weeks, he has hiked teachers' and medics' pay up to 60 percent.

"(The) reforms coupled with the weakness of personal property rights in Venezuela provide massive disincentive to any foreign investment in this country," Bear Stearns said.