Big Challenges Lie Ahead for a Delicate Winning Alliance in Venezuela
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

CARACAS, Venezuela — There were ear-to-ear smiles and a heady buzz in the hotel meeting room as the opposition leaders gathered here on Monday to discuss their stunning election victory. They had finally handed the government a major setback and they planned to announce that they had not only won a majority, but also a landslide of two-thirds of the seats in the legislature.

But as reporters waited for the event to start, a curious image flickered on a television mounted on the wall: one of the opposition’s most prominent members, its two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, was holding a separate news conference across town.

It was an early and telling indication of the challenges facing Venezuela’s long-fractured opposition, which has struggled for years to overcome its divisions. While the fragile coalition managed to come together to achieve victory over the Chavista government on Sunday, it now faces the test of trying to stick together and use its newly won congressional authority to address the country’s deep economic problems and political rifts.

Leaders of the Democratic Unity coalition, as the agglomeration of disparate parties is known, said its candidates had won at least 112 seats in the 167-member National Assembly that will be sworn in Jan. 5, giving it a two-thirds majority needed to call a constitutional convention, remove Supreme Court justices or carry out other important measures that could exert enormous pressure on the leftist government of President Nicolás Maduro.

The officials said that Mr. Maduro’s United Socialist Party had received at least 51 seats and that the winners in four races had not yet been determined.

Even with a smaller majority, the opposition legislators can remove the vice president, cabinet members and the directors of the Central Bank, and press ahead with investigations of corruption.

Enrique Márquez, an opposition legislator who won re-election, accused the government of deliberately withholding some election results Sunday night to hide the depth of its loss.

Chavismo, as the movement started by Mr. Maduro’s charismatic predecessor, President Hugo Chávez, is known, was wiped out in some of its traditional strongholds. The opposition said that it won both congressional districts in Barinas, Mr. Chávez’s home state, where one of the government candidates was a brother of the former president, Argenis Chávez.

“The victory was overwhelming,” Mr. Márquez said.

The anti-Chavista forces also won all the districts in Caracas, the capital, including areas that were once fervent government bastions. Mr. Maduro had dispatched many of the government’s best known officials to run for office around the country and in many cases those candidates lost.

In some states, the opposition got more than double the vote of the government party, opposition officials said.

The election was dominated by widespread weariness with the Maduro government and a growing economic crisis that has people shouldering the burden of triple-digit inflation, product shortages and long lines at stores with empty shelves.

While there are many different parties and leaders in the opposition, they generally agree on basic economic principles like the promotion of private enterprise and foreign investment.

“At least compared to Chavismo and Maduro they have very similar views on how to run the country and in that sense I don’t think the differences between them are huge,” said Francisco Rodríguez, an economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who predicted last April that the opposition could win a two-thirds majority. “But I do think there is no single, consolidated leadership and therefore these differences are going to arise and are going to continue to be prominent. And obviously, also when there’s a victory like this one, different political leaders will try to take advantage of it and to claim credit for it, and that’s normal.”

Colette Capriles, a political scientist, said that opposition leaders like Mr. Capriles were keenly aware that if Mr. Maduro was forced out in the coming months — a goal voiced by many in the opposition — there would probably be a new election to succeed him. Several of those leaders consider themselves contenders. “These are all chess moves,” said Ms. Capriles, a distant relative of Mr. Capriles’s. She said that she was surprised to see Mr. Capriles hold a solo news conference. “It’s like they are saying, ‘Here I am, I’m still politically important. I’m going to continue to cultivate my own political space.’ ”

The most telling split in the opposition is between a radical wing, led most prominently by Leopoldo López, a former mayor, and a more moderate wing, led primarily by Mr. Capriles.

Mr. López last year led a campaign of street protests to push for Mr. Maduro’s ouster, a strategy that Mr. Capriles resisted. The protests often turned violent or were met with aggressive actions by security forces to put them down. Mr. López was recently sentenced to more than 13 years in prison for his role in leading those protests, although his conviction was criticized internationally for the lack of due process.

But Mr. Capriles and Mr. López have long been rivals within the opposition movement, and Mr. López’s leadership of the more aggressive anti-government strategy only highlighted the rift between them.

One of the star attendees at the coalition news conference that Mr. Capriles skipped on Monday was Mr. López’s wife, Lilian Tintori, who has campaigned around the world for him to be released from prison.

“It’s not important,” Mr. Capriles, a state governor, said in a telephone interview, adding that it was normal for him to hold a news conference after an election. “They had their press conference and I had mine. There is no competition here.”

Yet he also said he wanted to make it clear that his more moderate approach had been vindicated.

“It wasn’t just Venezuela that won yesterday,” he said. “A policy won and that policy was ours.”

And he acknowledged that there was a fundamental division within the opposition over how to proceed. He said that it was urgent to focus first on economic issues.

But many opposition leaders talked forcefully after the landslide victory of moving quickly to seek Mr. Maduro’s removal from office — perhaps through a recall election, changes to the Constitution or by forcing him to resign.

“Given the seriousness of the crisis obviously we have to stay united,” Mr. Capriles said. But he added that the group’s unity had been affected in the past by “individual projects, by egos, and a misunderstanding of the reality that people were living.”

Freddy Guevara, a senior member of the Popular Will party led by Mr. López, who was at the coalition news conference, said that he was not troubled by Mr. Capriles holding his own session with the media, saying that it was his right as a leader and a state governor.

In the wake of the election it was not just the opposition that was thinking about potential strains on its unity.

Chavismo has been riven by increasingly deep divisions since the death of Mr. Chávez in 2013 and those will only be exacerbated by the election debacle. In the coming months, many analysts believe, there could well be pressure within Chavismo to cut a deal with the opposition, possibly putting pressure on Mr. Maduro to step down, which would trigger new elections. The knives were already out for the president on Monday. A popular Chavista blog featured a column calling for his resignation and that of the National Assembly leader, Diosdado Cabello.

The writer, Javier Antonio Vivas, said that the people had sent Mr. Maduro a message that his administration was “dreadful, sectarian, corrupt and vulgar.” He accused the politicians of murdering Mr. Chávez’s revolution and said that if they did not quit, the people would kick them out “before Chávez is erased from the historical, political and social thinking” of Venezuelans.

委內瑞拉國會 反對派首過半

阿根廷之後 拉美再右轉

委內瑞拉六日舉行國會選舉，選民為了嚴重的經濟危機和治安問題懲罰執政黨，反對派16年來首度贏得國會多數，總統馬杜洛受到空前挑戰。這是繼阿根廷右派贏得總統大選後，又一拉丁美洲左派重鎮向右轉。

選委會在午夜過後宣布，中間偏右的反對派聯盟「民主團結平台」（MUD）在國民議會167席中贏得99席，執政的委內瑞拉聯合社會黨（PSUV）拿下46席，尚有22席未確定。

總統認敗選 怪美經濟戰

馬杜洛已承認敗選，這是聯合社會黨已故創黨人查維茲1999年上台，推動21世紀社會主義革命，開啟拉丁美洲左派時代以來，執政黨最慘的一仗。

馬杜洛說：「反革命力量獲勝。」他將選舉結果歸咎於美國支持企業對委國發動的「經濟戰」。不過，他一改選前誓言無論如何絕不放棄權力的強硬立場，呼籲反對派與他「共存」。目前不清楚反對派如何利用國會優勢改變國家走向，甚至把馬杜洛拉下台。反對派可在明年4月馬杜洛任期過半後，發動公投決定他的去留。

經濟治安差 通膨率200％

馬杜洛在選前指出，反對派，以及以邁阿密、馬德里、波哥大為基地的外國軸心勢力，結合民間公司，意圖推翻他的政府。

反對派則指控政府實施物價和外匯管制，使經濟一敗塗地。委國也是全球謀殺率第二高的國家，人民的生命和財產都沒有保障。

BBC報導，委國經濟與油價息息相關，石油出口占出口總值九成以上，但油價從去年6月每桶115美元，跌到上月的50美元以下。國際貨幣基金（IMF）預測今年委國經濟萎縮10%，明年將再萎縮6%。

委國的通膨率也居全球之冠，IMF預測今年達到159%，明年更上升到200%。

日用品貴又缺 民怨爆發

委國2003年實施外匯管制，以防止資金外流，結果因進口貨太貴，公司被迫找國產貨取代，造成通膨。

為了對抗通膨，政府管制民生必需品物價，又造成商品嚴重短缺。過去兩年，民眾必須在超市外排隊幾小時才能買到必需品。最近民調顯示，民眾平均每周花5小時買日常用品，而且必須跑4家店才能買齊。

最難買到的是政府控制價格的42種主要食品，包括牛奶、米、咖啡、糖、玉米粉和食用油。

食品公司抱怨，政府管制物價，一些產品根本無利可圖。政府則指控商人故意囤積商品哄抬價格。國營電視台指控，物資短缺是「反對派在選前製造社會不滿」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/world/americas/big-challenges-lie-ahead-for-a-delicate-winning-alliance-in-venezuela.html

Video：The opposition Democratic Unity coalition had won 99 of 167 seats in Venezuela’s National Assembly as of early Monday, according to the country's electoral commission.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/americas/100000004079150/opposition-wins-in-venezuelan-election.html

Video：The White House spokesman Josh Earnest said election results showed that the people of Venezuela had clearly expressed their desire for a change in direction.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004079589/white-house-reacts-to-venezuelan-electio.html

2015-12-08．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡