Home > Venezuelan President Is Confident He Will Keep His Job
By JUAN FORERO
ARACAS, Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez said Thursday that victory in the referendum on his rule on Sunday was inevitable, as his adversaries mounted large rallies to marshal momentum in a last-ditch effort to end his presidency.
"I’m sure, God willing, that on Sunday night the Venezuelan people will be celebrating," Mr. Chávez said in a news conference, referring to the masses who support his leftist government. "It’s absolutely impossible for a surprise to occur."
The opposition worked hard to counter that impression in the last day of campaigning. Its umbrella organization, the Democratic Coordinator, organized six big marches across Caracas, the capital, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators declaring that the president’s days were numbered.
"The only problem we have is space," Carlos Valera, an opposition leader, said. "Our avalanche has overflowed the streets."
In front of Miraflores, the presidential palace, Mr. Chávez’s supporters also assembled in huge numbers.
Opinion polls have consistently shown a close race, but several recent ones have predicted that Mr. Chávez, who won the presidency in a landslide in 1998, will eke out a victory. In a three-and-a-half-hour news conference with more than 200 foreign and Venezuelan reporters, Mr. Chávez derided opposition members as pawns of the Bush administration and accused the United States of orchestrating efforts to remove him.
But he said that if he lost, he would allow his vice president, José Vicente Rangel, to take over, as required by the Constitution. Elections to pick a new president would take place a month later. Mr. Chávez, 50, has said he would run again even if he lost and even though the Constitution is unclear on whether he could or could not. "I’ll go relax and reflect for a few days and return in a month as a presidential candidate," he said.
Opposition leaders said they would not fight his efforts to run again. "If the president, after being defeated, insists, the opposition will accept the challenge," Enrique Mendoza, a leading opposition leader, said in an interview this week. "We would defeat him. If that’s what he wants, we have no problem with that."
Political analysts, though, say Mr. Chávez has had the upper hand recently. They say lavish spending on social programs and the opposition’s inability to articulate a message have solidified support for him.
At his news conference, Mr. Chávez, affable and confident, spoke expansively on a range of topics - from Simón Bolívar, to the C.I.A., to the question of what actor best portrayed James Bond. (Mr. Chávez voted for Sean Connery.) He also read from recent reports by Wall Street analysts who predicted turmoil in the oil markets, including higher prices for crude oil if he is removed on Sunday. "They’re getting used to me," the president said, a smile on his face.
His confidence may be particularly unshakable because he has been hedging his bets by carefully laying the electoral groundwork.
Voter rolls in recent weeks shot up by nearly 1.5 million - to 14 million voters - as a result of a government drive that gave new identification cards to the poor and citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Colombians, measures that are likely to produce votes for Mr. Chávez.
The government has also worked to restrict the electoral observer missions of the Organization of American States and the Carter Center in Atlanta, which have criticized the government in the past.