Venezuelan Opposition Shoots the Moon

In the recent Venezuelan parliamentary elections, Hugo Chavez's ruling Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR) won 114 out of 168 seats, and smaller parties allied to him won the rest. This means that the 'Chavez party' (so to speak) has every single seat in the legislature.

One-party rule isn't something you get in a democracy; that's more like Cuba or China. Although, in those cases the party is the government, rather than the party simply occupying all major positions in the govenrment.

So, how did the chavistas pull of this electoral feat? Simple: they ran unnopposed. All major opposition parties, from the left-leaning Democratic Action to the Christian Democrats to conservative Project Venezuela to libertarian Justice First withdraw from the elections and told people not to vote.

The supposed reason for this was fear of fraud on the part of the Chavez administration. This seems like a shaky argument, as international observors - from the EU and OAS, among others - were invited to oversee the election and ensure that no vote-rigging took place. A more likely explanation is that opposition-conducted opinion polls had shown Chavez and his party with approval ratings above 70% and the opposition with negative ratings nearly as high.

Vcrisis.com declared the election a victory for the opposition before it even took place, reasoning that every non-vote was a de facto vote against Chavez. This might make some sense, if the vast majority of opposition candidates had not been placed on the ballot despite the boycott, allowing for people to vote for them if they wished. Or if many poll workers in upper-class neighborhoods not refused to come in, barring people from voting even if they wanted to.

BUT, someone who doesn't know much about the situation will pick up the newspaper, read that Chavez's party is in total control, and assume that Venezuela is a dictatorship. It's pretty clever, actually.