They range from wealthy businessmen to boisterous students and poor single mothers, jammed together 10,000 strong in a stadium, chanting “change is possible!” and shoving forward to greet the man who is challenging Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s grip on power.
There’s a problem, however: Leopoldo Lopez can’t run for office.
Like many of Chavez’s opponents, some of whom are in jail or have fled the country, Lopez is barred as a candidate because of a corruption probe against him.
It’s a tactic critics say Chavez uses to put his opponents’ political ambitions on indefinite hold as he heads into next year’s congressional elections and his own re-election campaign in 2012.
Chavez insists he is simply enforcing the law, and corruption in Venezuela is widespread.
Lopez, a former Caracas district mayor, says that if he can’t run, he’ll recruit those who can.
To unseat Chavez is a task widely seen as futile at present. But the mere fact that Lopez’s efforts are resonating with ordinary Venezuelans shows that the democratic spirit still burns in the nation of 28 million.
Lopez, a youthful-looking 38, is crisscrossing the country wooing students, trade unionists and others with promising leadership skills. He hopes to mold them into a political movement for people who are disenchanted with Chavez’s rule, as well as with the elite who governed the country before him.
While Chavez’s appeal is in his embrace of the poor, Lopez wants to capitalize on the growing frustration that an oil-rich country, busy taunting the US and making far-reaching alliances with Iran and Russia, can’t tame inflation and crime or deliver uninterrupted water and electricity.
“What we want is to build a new majority from the bottom up — not just through negotiations and agreements between elites,” Lopez said. “It’s a longer road, but for us, it’s the only road that gives us possibilities of winning.”
By “elites,” he means the wealthy but fragmented — and increasingly gray-haired — opposition. But he too could be called elite, coming from a wealthy Caracas family, educated at Kenyon and Harvard in the US “empire” that Chavez reviles.
Chavez supporters dismiss him as a self-interested rich kid seeking to recover what the country’s wealthy “oligarchy” has lost to Chavez’s socialist measures. But his supporters love his charisma, his message of change, and his blonde wife, Lilian Tintori, a champion kite-surfer.
Lopez knows political success won’t come easily. Despite recent dips in the polls, Chavez remains the country’s most popular politician. But Lopez has made inroads with former Chavistas such as Rosmely Quiroz, 45, a single mother of two who says inflation makes it impossible to live on her minimum-wage salary — US$445 a month.
Lopez “is different from the rest,” Quiroz said, chanting with the crowd at this month’s rally in Valencia, an industrial city where Lopez kicked off the movement he calls “Voluntad Popular” (Popular Will) with women blowing kisses and students high-fiving him with chants of “Leopoldo! Leopoldo!”
“He’s extending a hand to those of us who want to get involved in politics — not for personal gain, but to solve our problems,” Quiroz said.
Anti-Chavez candidates rebounded in elections last year, capturing the Caracas mayoralty and five of the 24 states.
The pro-Chavez congress, however, struck back by removing power and budgets from local and state officials.
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