Monday 3 December 2007

Venezuela: A Functioning Democracy

In a dictatorship, a referendum does not go the wire, and the dictator certainly does not lose. Rather, he gets ninety-nine per cent of the vote, or something like that. So Venezuela is not a dictatorship. She is a functioning democracy. And she would have remained so if the referendum had gone the other way: Chávez could only have "stayed for life" if the People had kept voting for him until he died.

2 comments:

  1. The vote must have been about 70-30 against the referendum -- too large a margin to steal, despite Chavez's best efforts.

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  2. It would have been easily "big enough to steal" in a dictatorship. Anything would be. But Venezuela isn't one. Evidently.

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