Posted on 10/04/2012 5:31:33 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Anything is possible in Venezuela’s elections Sunday,but there is a good chance that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski will do better than any of his predecessors in the polls,and that—win or lose—he will put President Hugo Chavez’s 14-year-old regime against the ropes.
There is a plausible scenario that even if Capriles loses by a narrow margin,a good showing in Sunday’s election will allow him to keep the opposition unified,and to become a viable alternative to a president who may have terminal cancer, and who has no successor who could beat Capriles.
Under Venezuela’s constitution,if the president dies within the first four years of his term,new elections must be held within 30 days. If Capriles emerged as a strong opposition leader from this election,he would have a good chance of becoming the next president before Chavez’s term expires.
Many analysts see change in the air. In a Sept. 26 report entitled “Now or in a little while,”Barclays bank told its clients that “even in the event of a Chavez victory,we think that given the signs of his weak health conditions,if not now,political change could come in just a little while.”
While Chavez looks better than a few months ago and says that he is free from cancer, there are serious doubts that he has fully recovered. There are some reasons to believe that he now looks better not because he is cured from cancer,but because he has interrupted his treatment.
A study of Chavez’s daily public appearances by ODH,a Venezuelan consulting firm, shows that the president’s average daily television appearances during the first three weeks of September were significantly shorter than during the same period in August,and also shorter than his public appearances during the same period before the 2006 elections.
That would be hard to explain unless Chavez is ill:....
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
Chavez counts the votes.
He could choose to embargo the results and declare himself the winner. I think he did that before.
He could choose to not recognize the election as legitimate and rule as a real dictator for a while.
We are going to find out shortly.
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