By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS -- Venezuela's disparate and often disorganized Opposition is under pressure to get on with the job and come up with a clear alternative to President Hugo Chavez's government in the run-up to the parliamentary elections scheduled for September this year.

This, at least, is the conclusion of a recent opinion poll which appears to gain an echo at street level. Almost six of every 10 people questioned in the survey said they wanted the Opposition to "make proposals for the country." Even those describing themselves as supporters of the president or chavistas held to this view, as did those who were classified as politically neutral.

Not for the first time, the public wants the Opposition to make up its mind about who and what they represent. The difficulty is that the mainstream Opposition ranges right across the political spectrum, from the deeply conservative who yearn for the old days through to former leftist guerrillas, some of whom are still fighting the battles of a past that was consigned to history long before Chavez leapt on to the political stage.

The president's side of the political equation could also be described as broadly based -- but the difference is that they've got El Comandante to hold it all together. And in any case, he's not a friend of dissent and debate at the best of times, any more than are some of his more strident supporters.

However, it's not entirely plain sailing on the president's side of the political equation, either. His ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) held internal elections last weekend. The turn-out was reckoned to have come out at less than half the membership and perhaps rather less than that.

Opposition activists saw this as a sign that disillussion was settling in among the ranks of the chavistas. Be that as it may, and regardless of political allegiance, there's no shortage of things to grouse about.

Venezuela boasts one of the worst rates of violent crime in the world (some analyses put it at the very top), the cops aren't there when you need them, or when they are they're such bandits you wish they weren't, the country is on the rack from raging inflation, the economy is as vulnerable to the vagaries of world oil markets as ever it was, the health system doesn't hack it, the schools are sub-standard, and there are myriad little grumbles on top of all this.

But while Jose Public wants to see more decisiveness on the part of the Opposition, this means different things to different people. Nearly half the survey sample wanted to see a simple recipe for overall action. But a third wanted to see specific measure for particular problems -- above all. crime. Then around a fifth thought picking candidates should come before the policies were decided.

Jockeying for position to get on the list of Opposition candidates to run for the 167 seats at the National Assembly is already under way. And no sooner said than done, leading Opposition figures are at odds with each other over not only how the candidates should be picked, but also when.

There are two schools of thought about this. One holds that candidte selection would be best done in private meetings, avoiding any sign of divisions before the public eye. The other insists on holding primaries as a way of demonstrating the Opposition's democratic credentials, not least because the PSUV is using primaries.

Leopoldo Lopez, a former municipal mayor who's actually banned from running for or holding public office, is talking about holding primaries in May next year, which he says would still give time for campaigning. But he's not being very clear about when and how he thinks the Opposition should unveil the policies and measures it intends to advocate.

Julio Borges of Primero Justicia -- the party to which Lopez belonged before he switched to Un Nuevo Tiempo -- has instead argued that the Opposition should have its slate of candidates in place by the first quarter of next year.

Borges and his party maintain that the Opposition will need time to familiarize the public with its candidates; suspicion is that he actually wants to give the candidates time to thrash out the eventual policy platform. They also favor a mixture of primaries where there's competition for nominations and behind-closed-doors deals where supposedly there's not.

Whether the candidates should come before the platform, or vice versa, is a classic case of the chicken and the egg. At grass roots level, there's an awareness that this dilemma has been problematic for the Opposition in the past, and could be all over again.

"We can't just run on a ticket saying we're not Chavez, and that's it," said one ageing party activist with Accion Democratica (AD), one of the two big parties that dominated Venezuelan politics before Chavez burst on to the stage a decade ago. "We can't campaign on a negative. That won't pursuade the undecided to vote, and we need them to make the difference," he added with a candor that is usually not heard from those at the top.

In the past, Chavez has tended to win elections by margins of three votes to two with the exception of a referendum he lost by a couple of percentage points two years ago. The activist concedes that it's up to the Opposition rather than the president to make the running if they're to make inroads into his power base. And his reckoning is that policies rather than personalities will matter more in the end.

"The only time we won was when we stood on a specific political issue," he argued. He was referring to the 2007 referendum which narrowly rejected a first bid by Chavez to rid the constitution of a ban on successive re-election -- an issue the president eventually won at a second referendum.

It's thought that at least some of those who voted No in the first referendum quietly did so even though they were sympathetic to the president. "If we give them reason to do so, maybe they'll vote out way again," said the veteran AD man.

In the meantime, another question mark is hanging in the air. This centers on the student movement, which has played a prominent role in political activism against the Chavez regime in the past., but appeared to run out of energy some time in September.

Whether this was a temporary blip because the student body was involved in internal elections remains to be seen. The elections were eventually won by a slate of candidates broadly sympathetic to the Opposition, so there was no underlying change there. But there's speculation that a change of tactics is in the air.


Time was when student leaders' primary aim was to get as many of their number out on the streets as possible. The rationale behind this was that the students had to show that while they might be largely middle class in origin they still had support at street level.

But more recently, as the momentum of marches and protests appeared to slow, a change of tactics was perceived to be emerging. In early October, a small group of students went round embassies seeking international support for their demand that outsiders take more notice of what they see as a threat to democratic order in Venezuela, and bring pressure to bear on Chavez to change his ways.

There was something slightly unrealistic about all this. If the students thought that other governments were about to start manning the diplomatic barricades on their behalf, they were soon to be disabused of any such idea. The Brazilian Foreign Ministry quickly clarified that it had no intention of getting mixed up with the internal affairs of another sovereign state, and other Latin American countries followed suit.

The new student leadership at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) on Tuesday announced a march. It was the first student march, or one in which students played a leading part, since a procession that ended in police repression on August 22. However, there were notable differences this time: The route of the march was restricted to the campus, and its purpose was to urge action to curb violence on the campus.

In both respects, the emphasis is on the local rather than the national, more to do with specific student issues than anything else. The campus has become a target of sporadic attacks, including one in which nine students were injured by gunshots after returning from a march two years ago.

The latest incident involved damage done to an entrance to the campus, supposedly by a group of chavista students. Before that, there was yet another armed attack when unidentified gunmen opened fire at the administration block. No injuries were reported.