Venezuela lifts limits on terms in office

So, Hugo Chavez has won his hotly disputed constitutional amendment, or so it seems according to the BBC’s breaking news only three hours after the end of the vote. The amendment was approved with 54 per cent of the vote.

The vote was to amend a constitution that currently only permits elected officials – including the president but also governors and mayors – to be in power a maximum of two terms. The amendment permits any citizen to become a candidate as many times as he or she wants.

Why exactly this brings the country closer to a dictatorship – as the opposition media in Venezuela have been moaning about for weeks – escapes me. The same howls against Chavez’s ‘dictatorship’ have been made in Bolivia where the opposition now claim that president Morales wants to perpetuate himself in power. Lies, lies and more lies.

Nobody, however, seems concerned with the fact that president Uribe of Colombia, that great ambassador for democracy, is keen on making the same constitutional amendment. Nor has anyone told the Spanish Euro MP who was paraded by the Venezuelan opposition in front of their TV channels to outrage the country with accusations of dictatorship that there are no limits to the time a leader serves in Spain.

In fact, there are no limits to the time served by prime ministers in Britain – how long was there Margaret Thatcher? – German chancellors (how about Helmut Kohl?) or, in fact, 17 of the 27 countries of the European Union. So why exactly this is a problem is a mystery to me, especially when Venezuela has had more consultations in the last 10 years – all internationally regarded as perfectly honest and clean – than ever before in its history. Could it be that all these voices against Chavez simply don’t like him? I wonder.