New Parliamentarian Candidates Announced in Venezuela Amid Controversy

Santa Elena, August 5, 2015. (venezuelanalysis.com)- On Monday, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro announced that a former political opponent and two former opposition activists would appear on the ballot of the socialist alliance, the Great Patriotic Pole, for the December 6^th National Assembly elections.

In a surprise announcement from Caracas, the Venezuelan leader welcomed Ricardo Sánchez, who currently sits in parliament for the opposition, Carlos Vargas, and Andrés Avelino, all of whom he insists have “acquiesced to join a democratic movement…and asked to form part of this admirable campaign.”

The Great Patriotic Pole (GPP) was formed by Hugo Chavez in 2011 as an electoral alliance headed by the governing United Socialist Party (PSUV), uniting a wide range of left-wing social movements and smaller parties.

The GPP alliance currently holds two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly as well as 20 of the 23 governorships across the nation.

Sanchez, Vargas and Avelino were introduced on the ballot as the leaders of a new party called “Alliance for Change.”

After the announcement, Miranda governor Henrique Capriles Radonski told reporters Sanchez was a “dark figure” in politics and “an example to children of what they should never become.”

In response, Sanchez, who was chosen to replace hardline opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Parliament in 2010, lashed out at Capriles via Twitter, threatening to reveal incriminating secrets against him.

Marea Socialista Controversy

The newly minted “Alliance for Change” party was approved on Thursday by the National Electoral Council (CNE), provoking further debate.

Critics from the left accused the CNE of disparity, highlighting its failure to approve the Trotskyist Marea Socialista’s bid to run as an independent party.

In May, shortly after Marea Socialista (MS) announced it was going to run its own candidates separate from the PSUV, the Supreme Court declared the party’s name to be unlawful, insisting the term “Socialist Tide” was a phrase or slogan rather than a proper name.

The court accepted the party’s petition for an appeal, but the date has not been set. In turn, the CNE has avoided making a formal statement, though the deadline for postulation is in two days.

In the absence of a formal ballot, the banned party is attempting to ally itself with small, independent parties as potential platforms for their candidates.

As of yesterday, MS has forged such alliances in Tachira and Bolivar state, while conversations are underway in Caracas.

The party has positioned itself as an “alternative” for Chavistas disillusioned with the PSUV, which it has accused of corruption and inefficiency.

When announcing the split, MS leader Nicmer Evans said the decision was motivated by the “necessity of a critical and self-critical vision” to correct the course of the revolutionary process.

In response to their criticism, National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello has accused MS of “fifth columnist,” or treasonous behavior.

Opposition Split

Meanwhile, the GPP’s opposition counterpart, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), announced this morning the expulsion of the party Copei for the upcoming electoral race.

Copei, a Christian Democratic party founded by former president Rafael Caldera, played an important role in the neoliberal era preceding Chavez known as the Fourth Republic.

The party’s dismissal stemmed from a Supreme Court ruling last week that put the MUD’s status in jeopardy due to irregularities in Copei administration.

The verdict hinged on four elected Copei officials who were replaced in their posts without the approval of party members.

Additionally, party leader Roberto Enriquez signed Copei’s name to the “National Transition Agreement” along with hardline opposition figures Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado, again without consulting the ranks. The document, released in February, called for the removal of the democratically elected Maduro administration without reference to constitutional procedure.

In doing this, Copei members said, “Enriquez put his own personal interests above those of the party, and committed our organization to an event and to political determinations that had not been debated by us.”

Instead of waiting for Copei to elect new leadership as per the court ruling, the MUD preferred to remove them rather than risk being tainted by their questionable legality.

The opposition alliance now seeks to fill the 27 slots that Copei would have occupied on their ballot before presenting their bid to the CNE.

In a separate announcement, the MUD named Freddy Guevara, a student leader closely associated with the jailed hard right Leopoldo Lopez, as the stand-in for Maria Corina Machado, after the latter was barred from candidacy after failing to disclose her income during her time as congresswoman.

Z.C. DUTKA

PUBLISHED ON AUG 5TH 2015 AT 6.24PM

* http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11463

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 Marea Socialista to Launch Independent Parliamentary Candidates, Proposes Citizens’ Audit

Trotskyist Chavista collective, Marea Socialista (MS), has announced that it would be fielding its own candidates independent of the governing Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in this year’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

Formerly a current within the PSUV, MS declared that it had already applied to the country’s National Electoral Council for the right to its own candidate list and is currently awaiting the body’s decision.

MS leader Nicomar Evans stated that the group’s decision was motivated by the “necessity of a critical and self-critical vision” towards the revolutionary process in which “critiques can be formulated and the course corrected”.

In this vein, he indicated that MS candidates must be committed to realizing “a public citizen’s audit in order to detect fraudulent elements in the allotment of dollars,” referring to widespread fraud among private firms, who pocket government-issued preferential dollars and change them on the booming black market, in lieu of importing essential items.

Evans has long criticized government inaction in the face of massive import fraud, which has cost the country billions in public funds, calling for MS candidates to rejuvenate the revolutionary process with new ideas.

In contrast to both the Venezuelan opposition, which requires its candidates to pay the equivalent of roughly 22 monthly minimum wages, and the PSUV, “which established age and sex requirements”, MS demands that its candidates have a “profile of ideas concerning the role of a revolutionary chavista legislator in relation to the struggle against corruption and economic measures”.

Last month, the grassroots assemblies of the PSUV concluded their process of choosing candidates for internal primaries at the end of May, of whom half are youth under 30 and 60% are women.

The right wing press has characterized MS’ decision to opt for its own parliamentary candidates a rejection of President Nicolas Maduro and a schism within the ranks of Chavismo.

However, MS has denied these assertions, reaffirming its support for the socialist leader and emphasizing that “all [of its members] are social fighters and defenders of the Revolution”.

Evans further clarified that his collective’s decision to present its own candidates did not preclude support for those of the PSUV.

“If there are candidates within the revolutionary process that are capable of assuming the commitment that we are proposing as a profile, the grassroots of Marea Socialista could support them.”

Nonetheless, "if we don’t find any [candidates within the PSUV] then we will be looking for them not only within the ranks of Marea [Socialista], but also among the social movements,” he added.

LUCAS KOERNER

PUBLISHED ON MAY 7TH 2015 AT 8.48AM

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11375

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 Venezuela’s PSUV Accused of Expelling Marea Socialista Dissidents

Mérida, 24^th November 2014 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) held internal elections on Sunday to choose almost 4000 local leaders. However the election was preceded by accusations that several party dissidents had been arbitrarily ejected from the organisation.

In yesterday’s nationwide internal election, PSUV members chose 3.988 heads of the Circles of Popular Struggle. Each Circle groups together four Bolivar-Chavez Battle Units (UBCh), which are the party’s key electoral campaigning organisations. The UBCh are in turn formed by local party branches, called “sectoral patrols”.

Speaking to national media yesterday, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who is also PSUV leader, welcomed the election as “extraordinary, groundbreaking and historic,” and argued, “We are setting down the bases of a radical, direct and deep democracy”.

The election was part of the renovation and reorganisation of the PSUV, which was founded by former president Hugo Chavez in 2007, ahead of the 2015 parliamentary elections. On 29 – 30 November and then 6-7 December the heads of the 13,682 UBCh and 136,820 sectoral patrols will also be elected, creating what Maduro called “the organised vanguard of the new leadership and new socialist modernity of Venezuela”.

The president also said that turnout for the internal election was higher than the election for national conference delegates in July this year, whose turnout was never disclosed. On paper the party has over 7 million members in a nation of 30 million, however other sources place the real number of activists under 3 million.

It was announced that the Great Patriotic Pole (GPP), the coalition of parties which supports the Bolivarian government, will hold a national congress in December, completing the cycle of political organisation among pro-government forces ahead of next year’s legislative elections.

During Sunday’s internal election various PSUV figures praised the party’s democratic character and strength as the country’s foremost political force. “No one can deny that the PSUV is the most revolutionary, democratic and creative party in the history of Venezuela…here is the country’s force of socialist and democratic modernity,” said Maduro as he cast his vote in Caracas.

Other voices contested the PSUV’s narrative of the internal election. Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former opposition presidential candidate, said during an event today that the PSUV “is a boat that is sinking and everyone is going down. Nicolas (Maduro) and his combo will be left on their own. Voting centres looked empty during the internal election”.

Political analyst and dissident chavista Nicmer Evans tweeted that according to his sources only 10% of PSUV members in Caracas turned out and that less than one million members nationally participated in the election. “It [the PSUV] doesn’t stop being a great machine, but it continues to reduce,” he said.

Alleged Expulsion of Dissidents

The PSUV’s internal election was preceded by accusations made through media that two leaders of the dissident leftist grouping in the PSUV, Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide), had been arbitrarily removed from the party’s membership. Marea Socialista claimed in a 20 November press release that Nicmer Evans and Heiber Barreto Sanchez, along with Carlos Hurtado, the coordinator of the Socialist Middle Class organisation, had been made absent from an electronic list of party members ahead of the internal election.

“We exhort the national leadership of the PSUV to inform and clarify if the members from Marea Socialista and Socialist Middle Class have been suspended from the party or not,” said the press release.

The controversy comes after several chavista organisations, including Socialist Middle Class, declared their intention to work with MS in pushing a critical line and alternative solutions to the country’s current economic woes and perceived problems of official corruption and bureaucracy.

At a recent forum in Caracas, MS also agreed to campaign for the suspension of disciplinary proceedings against two leading PSUV figures after an internal fallout in the party in June. Concern was also raised over a “whistleblower” phone line apparently set up by the PSUV for members to denounce each other for “promoting division”.

The alarm was raised after Franciso Ameliach, a state governor and the PSUV’s vice president for electoral affairs, tweeted on 12 November that “the activist that is promoting disunity should be denounced,” followed by a mobile number and gmail address named “denounce PSUV infiltrators”.

According to an article written on 20 November by leftist commentators Toby Valderrama and Antonio Aponte, Ameliach also said recently on his program on state radio RNV, “The enemy that does us most damage is the internal enemy, the fifth column, that disguises itself as chavista and isn’t chavista”.

Nicmer Evans criticised his apparent expulsion from the PSUV and other developments in an article published on independent pro-government website Aporrea.org on Sunday.

“The consecutive actions against a socialist and chavista tendency within the PSUV (Marea Socialista) that meets to debate proposals for solutions to the crisis; the bureaucracy’s decree to dissolve internal tendencies; and the declaration of a fight to the death against criticism and proposals through the so called “Mission Toad [whistleblower]”, put in evidence the progressive deterioration of a leadership that has lost its way…[A leadership] that rejects dialogue and tolerance for those who have demonstrated being capable of giving their lives for the socialist and revolutionary project led by (Hugo) Chavez,” he wrote.

President Maduro referred to the issue of internal party unity yesterday, stating, “We’re not involved in intrigue, fights, competition, backstabbing…we embrace each other in brotherhood, in struggle…because we feel like the brothers of Chavez”.

EWAN ROBERTSON

PUBLISHED ON NOV 24TH 2014 AT 7.30PM

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11036

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