The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is set to make history by becoming the first political party in Venezuela to hold democratic internal elections to select its candidates, as required by the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999.

This week, any of the 5.7 million people who signed up to be members of the PSUV can nominate candidates to run in the elections for the 355 mayoralties and 24 state governors.

The internal PSUV candidate election will be held on June 1, after a two-week process of circulating lists of candidates throughout the party membership as well as forums and discussions where the prospective candidates may be seen and heard by all. Publicity and media campaigns on behalf of the prospective candidates are strictly forbidden.

Al candidates will be required to commit themselves to advancing the PSUV program as previously discussed and adopted by the PSUV membership.

[ 19 August 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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For many, it came as a great shock when Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, said at the World Social Forum in January of 2005 in Brazil that "we have to reinvent socialism". Capitalism, he stressed, has to be transcended if we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world. "We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything."

That statement, however, did not drop from the sky. It was the product of a spontaneous rejection of neoliberalism by masses in 1989, the election of Chavez with a promise to change things in 1998 and the response to the combination of the domestic oligarchy and imperialism in their attempt to overthrow Chavez in 2002 and 2003. The embrace of this new socialism, in short, was the product of struggle.

The struggle continues. And, we can see that out of struggle comes creativity. In particular, the struggle in Venezuela has stressed the importance of a revolutionary democracy -- a process in which people transform themselves as they directly transform circumstances. Through the development of communal councils representing 200 to 400 families in urban areas and as few as 20 in the rural areas, people have begun to identify their needs and their capacities and to transform the very character of the state into one which does not stand over and above civil society but rather becomes the agency for working people themselves. "All power to the communal councils" has been the call of Chavez; “The communal councils must become the cell of the new socialist state.”

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A controversy has broken out this week inside Venezuela’s largest opposition party, A New Era (UNT in its Spanish acronym), over a lack of democracy in the party’s internal candidate selection process for the upcoming state and local elections in November.

On Tuesday UNT President Omar Barboza, announced to the media that the party had selected candidates for 314 of Venezuela’s 335 municipalities by “consensus.”

However, in a parallel press conference, UNT member Emilio Graterón, a pre-candidate for the opposition stronghold of Chacao, a wealthy municipality in eastern Caracas, denounced the decision of his party to support the candidacy of Liliana Hernández for Chacao, as the imposition of a “leadership pact.”

Graterón accused an unnamed director of a privately owned television station of being the person who decided Hernández’s candidacy.

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Venezuela expert consultants predict today a triumph of President Chávez followers in the oncoming regional elections, including the loss by the opposition of rich Zulia state.

German Campos, director of the poll group Consultants 30-11, estimates there is only at present three of the 22 states swinging [against] the Partido Socialista Unido of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies: in Nueva Esparta, Sucre and Carabobo.

“The rest is red”, he said alluding to the distinctive color of the PSUV led by Chávez...

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Meanwhile, the democracy bug has yet to bite the leading opposition party in Venezuela:

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It's also confirmed by this:

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The Bolivarian Constitution adopted through popular referendum in 1999 requires all political parties to hold democratic elections for leadership positions and candidates. So far the PSUV is the only political party in Venezuela to meet this requirement.

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