Caracas – Thousands of supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez marched here Thursday to express criticism of several opposition parties that decided to withdraw from the upcoming legislative elections.
Marching under the slogan “the people don’t pull out” and dressed in red, the color of Chavez’s Fifth Republic Movement, backers of the president made their way through downtown Caracas together with several pro-government candidates for seats in the National Assembly.
Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel, meanwhile, hailed the upcoming Sunday elections as a “mechanism for preserving democracy,” noting that the great opponent “to defeat is (voter) abstention.”
Rangel said that “as far as we are able to defeat abstention, we will do away with the Fourth Republic,” as backers of the current government refer to the political status quo prior to Chavez taking over the presidency in 1999.
Pre-Chavez politics in Venezuela was dominated by two traditional parties of broadly centrist views, Democratic Action (AD) and Copei.
The vice president said various opposition parties, including AD and Copei, were boycotting Sunday’s balloting because “they have no votes.” He also continued to accuse the opposition parties of being allies of Washington and of staging a “subversive electoral boycott” in a fresh attempt to destabilize Chavez’s administration.
Chavez survived an abortive coup in 2002 and a devastating two-month-long general strike in 2003 before garnering nearly 60 percent support in last year’s referendum on cutting short his mandate.
Since beating back the recall, Chavez has ratcheted-up the intensity of his diatribes against Washington, even musing publicly about the possibility of severing diplomatic ties or cutting off oil shipments to the United States.
The AD, with 26 of the 165 seats in the National Assembly, is being joined in the boycott by Project Venezuela, which has seven members in the legislature; Copei, with six; and Justice First, with five seats.
All four of those opposition parties say that the election ground rules favor the Chavez administration, and expressed their distrust of the system of electronic voting.
More than 14 million Venezuelans are eligible to vote in Sunday’s elections to fill all 167 seats in the National Assembly, where pro-government parties enjoy a slight majority.
