PRESIDENT Hugo Chavez's timing was impeccable, scheduling the vote that ended term limits at what may be the last possible moment before the global financial crisis wreaks havoc on Venezuela's oil-based economy. When it hits, his support will undoubtedly suffer – meaning he is far from assured a victory in the next presidential vote in 2012. As he spoke from a palace balcony to thousands of triumphant supporters, Chavez called his referendum win a “perfect victory.” But behind the rhetoric, Chavez has been struggling against a long slide at the polls, and Sunday's numbers reflected that. Chavez captured more than 54 percent of the vote, according to preliminary tallies of 94 percent of results. That roughly mirrored November's state elections in which his candidates won 53 percent of the vote. Yet it was a far cry from 2006, when the president won re-election with a whopping 63 percent. And now Chavez also has to contend with an increasingly gloomy economic outlook. His country remains heavily dependent on oil income, which has plummeted as prices for heavy Venezuelan crude have fallen 72 percent since record highs last July. Inflation soaring above 30 percent is eroding Venezuelans' salaries. While the government still predicts modest growth, some analysts expect the economy to shrink by as much as 4 percent this year. In his decade in power, Chavez has long spent heavily on social programs to buttress his support, and he plans to spend more than $200 billion in the next four years to build railways, improve health care, support agriculture and invest in energy. But those plans will increasingly be hamstrung by financial realities. “I suggest the president get to work,” Antonio Ledezma, Caracas' newly elected opposition mayor, told The Associated Press. “He should use these four years to govern, to solve the problems that haven't been solved in the past 10 years.” The 54-year-old former army officer says he hopes to remain for at least a decade and maybe much more – “as long as God wishes.” Opponents fear he'll be in office for life. A more pragmatic president in a less polarized country might try to work with those opponents to deal with shared problems such as violent crime, which polls show is Venezuelans' top concern. But Chavez and his political adversaries deeply distrust one another, and neither has shown eagerness to reach out to the other side. Chavez won Sunday with much more than the typical advantages of a sitting president, mobilizing public employees for the campaign and getting out his message through a battery of state-run news media and frequent presidential speeches that all television stations were required to air. But he nonetheless showed he still has what it takes to rally his supporters – an ability that was in question after his bruising defeat in December 2007, when voters rejected broader constitutional changes. That said, opposition leaders were encouraged to see that Chavez mustered about 1 million fewer votes than in his 2006 re-election, something Teodoro Petkoff, who edits the paper Tal Cual, said “speaks to a persistent decline in the power of Chavismo.” “They may celebrate today,” he wrote in a front-page editorial Monday, “but on the horizon of 2012 what's starting to loom is the ghost of an inevitable defeat.”
