Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, held a referendum to consolidate power as a potential president for life. He lost and acknowledged it! Prior to today, I’d probably default to describing him as an populist autocrat, I’ve now mentally upgraded him to populist with autocratic tendencies.
As Ezra Klein notes, this definitely means that Venezuela is not totalitarian, although I don’t think anyone who knows their comparative governments and had any sense actually believed that. I also tend to agree with Ezra’s commentators that the true test of whether I can drop the autocratic tendencies will be whether he steps aside when in five years his six year term is up.
Every crisis president tends to overreach, in a healthy society even their allies will eventually push back as happened in Venezuela. Chavez was more ambitious than most and did deserve to be smacked down, but now that he’s accepted it he has a chance to moderate it. With any luck he’ll switch to behaving a bit more like his comrade Bolivian President Evo Morales who is still trying to introduce socialism. Via Yglesias, for here’s an analysis that breaks down the good and bad parts of the referendum (from before the vote) and not surprisingly finds it bad on the balance.
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