After Chavez, Does 21st Century Socialism Have A Future?

[DonViejo]

Apr 14, 2013 10:33 AM EDT

Polls show Chevez’s hand-picked heir is likely to emerge victorious – but it remains to be seen if Nicolás Maduro can hold together El Comandante’s coalition. Mac Margolis reports.

For the third time in just six months, millions of Venezuelans are going to the polls today to cast a critical vote. At stake is not just who is to run Latin America's most bitterly divided nation but also the fate of the most brazen experiment in political engineering since the generalissimos and old school “caudillos” called the shots in the Americas.

For the last 14 years, the Venezuelans have known this as the revolution for 21st Century Socialism. This was former president Hugo Chavez's mashup of state capitalism and vintage populism, bound together by personal charisma and petrodollars, and served up presumably with the imprimatur of the Latin Liberator, Simon Bolivar himself. But what will they call it now that Chavez is gone, killed last month by cancer, and with his Bolivarian revolution falling into economic disarray, and the country he played like a violin shaken by political dissonance not seen since the Cold War?

According to most voter preference surveys, Chavez's handpicked heir, former foreign minister Nicolás Maduro, is likely to emerge the victor. Maduro began the race with a comfortable advantage and held it throughout the short campaign. But his lead against united opposition challenger, Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, has markedly tumbled in the last week, according to veteran political pulse taker Luis Vicente Leon, of the respected polling firm Datanalisis.

Radonski lost by a 55 to 44 percent margin to Chavez in last October's election, but gave the Bolivarian incumbent a fright by drawing 6.6 million votes, the best any challenger has done since Chavez took office in 1999. In regional elections in December, Capriles went on to trounce the official candidate, Elias Jaua, a former vice president to Chavez, for governor in key Miranda state.

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