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Opposition gains ground in Venezuela elections
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-25 12:57 The opposition's wins in major urban centers enhance its visibility and build up its credibility that it can meet voters' demands for better services such as trash collection.
Leopoldo Lopez, a young opposition star who the government blocked from standing with legal technicalities, said the election showed Venezuelan politics had finally shifted after years of Chavez's dominance. "We need to build an alternative for a different Venezuela that brings people together in the center," he said. But Chavez, a former paratrooper who sought to polarize the election by threatening during the campaign to cut off funds, or even deploy tanks, in areas where "oligarchs" won, immediately went on the offensive on Monday. He warned he would keep his eye on one opposition governor, Enrique Capriles of Miranda state, recalling a legal case accusing him of supporting a failed coup against Chavez in 2002. The president, who shut an opposition TV station last year, demanded "severe sanction" against another channel for saying his candidate had lost in one race before it was official. Chavez has stripped some powers from elected officials, including authority over the police and hospitals in Caracas, and threatened to create government posts to oversee them. "This reduces the importance of the gains made by the opposition as it will make it more difficult ... to build on them to mount a serious challenge to the regime down the road," Goldman Sachs senior economist Alberto Ramos said. |
