Chavism Loses a Battle: Can It Recover and Rectify?

Chavism received a serious blow in the parliamentary elections this last Sunday, December 6. The strength of the blow is such that the movement is still reeling. The Venezuelan opposition, loosely organized in an electoral bloc called the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), achieved not just a majority of seats in the National Assembly but also the qualified majorities needed to call for referendums, initiate constitutional reform, and reorganize the judicial branch. The long-term consequences of this setback, which are likely grave and possibly disastrous, will depend on the Chavist movement's capacity to both maintain internal order and also renovate itself. Faced with these electoral results, President Nicolás Maduro has been among the first to call for self-critique and renovation in Chavism. This is something the late leader Hugo Chávez tried to launch with the “3Rs” campaign(Revision, Rectification, Re-impulsing) some five years ago. Yet serious self-criticism has always eluded the Bolivarian movement. More than an ethical issue, it is a problem of organization: who will critique whom and with what force? History has shown the difficulty in balancing democracy and centralism within the left's universally-subscribed framework of democratic centralism. Effective critique usually comes only when a new internal force emerges, such as the Chinese Red Guards of the mid-1960s, typically supported by some fraction of the old guard. No such thing has ever happenned in Chavism. More