Polls show Maduro ahead, PetroCaribe safe

Lawrence Alfred Powell, Columnist

Following Hugo Chavez's March 5 cancer death and nearly a month of public mourning, a new constitutionally mandated election is being held tomorrow in Venezuela.

Interim President Nicolas Maduro, a mustachioed 50-year-old former Caracas bus driver who rose to become the nation's minister of foreign affairs and vice-president, is facing off against 40-year-old opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, the former governor of Miranda state.

To most Venezuelans, Maduro represents a welcome, albeit less charismatic, continuation of Chavez's legacy of catering to the majority poor and devoting the country's oil revenues to development of social programmes to further improve their status. He is also the candidate most likely to continue Chavez's PetroCaribe arrangements and his anti-imperial foreign-policy stance in regional and world affairs.

Capriles represents the interests of disaffected middle- and upper-class Venezuelans whose comfortable lifestyle and investment opportunities were cast aside during Chavez's populist 14-year rule. He is clearly the preferred candidate of the United States, of ousted corporate investors, and of the dominant international media outside Venezuela.

MADURO AHEAD

Political campaigning for the upcoming election officially began on Tuesday. A number of national opinion polls have been done since Chavez's death, most showing Maduro, his preferred successor, ahead by 10 or more percentage points.

Venezuelan polls can vary widely, reflecting political biases, but the overall pattern suggests a 10-15-point lead for Maduro leading into the election. A March 22 ICS poll showed Maduro at 58 per cent, and Capriles at 41 per cent. Dataincorp, as of March 31, had Maduro ahead by 61 per cent to 26 per cent, with the Hinterlaces polling firm reporting 55 per cent to 35 per cent on the same day. An April 1 GISXXI survey shows Maduro with 55 and Capriles with 45, and an April 2 IVAD poll shows 53 to 35.

The magnitude of Maduro's lead also suggests that widespread popular support for the goals of the Bolivarian revolution and its policies continues, despite the loss of Chavez's guiding personality. Back in October 2012, Chavez had won his last presidential election with 55 per cent of the vote, 45 per cent going to opponent Capriles. The final September poll, by Datanalisis, leading into that election, had shown Chavez ahead by 13 per cent.

So with Maduro attracting similar numbers, there is not much evidence of eroding support, or at least not yet. In the most recent GISXXI poll, for example, which surveyed 1,500 people nationally, 71 per cent agreed with the statement that "the most important thing is to continue President Chavez's project". Only 20 per cent felt that "with the loss of President Chavez, the end of the revolution has arrived".

These figures - if they continue through tomorrow's election - suggest that most Venezuelans remain passionate to continue Hugo Chavez's reforms, and feel that the Bolivarian ideals ought to be pursued by post-Chavez administrations.

Only 26 per cent of Venezuelans feel that a victory by Capriles would be in the country's interest, whereas about 60 per cent feel a Maduro victory would. Worse still for Capriles' election prospects, his media attacks on Maduro for using Chavez's demise and funeral ceremonies to political advantage have apparently backfired.

In the same poll, 52 per cent of Venezuelans felt that Capriles' behaviour following the news of Chavez's death had been bad, or very bad, whereas only 30 per cent thought it was good, or very good. Conversely, 60 per cent thought Maduro's behaviour during the same period was good or very good, with 25 per cent saying it was bad, or very bad.

And Capriles' repeated suggestions that he, as president, would steer a post-Chavez Venezuela towards a more moderate economic path, akin to Lula's in Brazil, backfired days ago as well - with Lula openly backing Maduro as his preferred candidate.

LEADERSHIP AND ISSUES

In terms of perceived personal qualities, the GISXXI survey showed that, across 11 different positive leadership traits, Maduro is well ahead of Capriles on all of them - by about 15-20 per cent on average. These include sincere (53%, 30%), honest (54%, 32%), represents change (55%, 38%), can unify Venezuelans (59%, 36%), competent (61%, 42%), has the necessary authority to govern (61%, 37%), capable of making difficult decisions (64%, 41%), brave (66%, 48%), energetic (68%, 49%), nice ('sympatico', 49%, 35%), and close to the people (69%, 44%).

Note that two of the widest gaps between how the two candidates are perceived are on their 'sincerity' and their 'honesty', which does not bode well for Capriles' election prospects.

In terms of how each would perform as president on policies and social issues, Maduro again made a clean sweep in the GISXXI poll. Across 10 different issue areas, the survey found that most Venezuelans consider him to be ahead of Capriles on how he would handle corruption (54%, 25%), unemployment (56%, 27%), poverty (59%, 24%), housing (62%, 23%), roads (59%, 25%), electricity supply (56%, 26%), cost of living and inflation (55%, 27%), food shortages (56%, 27%), insecurity (52%, 26%), and social inequalities (57%, 26%) .

CURSES AND DESTABILISATION

In the midst of the campaign, Maduro has made some heated statements that could lead voters to question this gentle, 'sympatico' image. Speaking at a rally in Amazonas state recently, he invoked a centuries-old curse, the curse of Macarapana, which refers to the 16th-century battle in which occupying Spanish colonialists massacred local Indian forces en masse.

Over in the opposition camp, with victory looking less and less likely, Capriles and his US political allies have already begun pre-emptively challenging the election process in the media - hoping to generate protests against an 'unfair' outcome.

A mass march was held earlier this week in Caracas, with thousands of opposition supporters. And although all other polls have shown Maduro well ahead, one aberrant poll of 3,000 Venezuelan respondents conducted by Argentine pollster Ivan Rodriguez (Datamatica) suddenly shows Capriles leading by five points. Datamatica reports that "the intention of voting for Maduro fell sharply by 20.5 per cent, and increased 18 per cent for Capriles".

That strategy has been tried before - creating opposition expectations of winning, followed by charges of election fraud when they don't, hoping to generate enough infighting and international media attention to destabilise the political order.

But sowing seeds of discontent so soon after the unifying national experience of Chavez's death will look petty, and, of course, most Venezuelans know that they are on record with international observers as having an election process that, according to ex-US President Jimmy Carter and others, "of the 92 elections that we've monitored ... is the best in the world".

Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a former senior lecturer at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.