In Venezuela, the rise of Chavez and the Bolivarian movement was made possible by the spectacular collapse of the two thitherto dominant political parties -- the social Democratic Action Party (Acción Democrática, AD) and the Christian democratic Social Christian Party (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, COPEI).:
***** Venezuela: Popular Sovereignty versus Liberal Democracy Michael Coppedge April 2002 The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
...Increasing disaffection with the system became evident as abstention grew from a low of 3.5 percent in 1973 to 12 percent in 1978 and 1983, 18 percent in 1988, and 39.8 percent in 1993. Many observers know that AD and COPEI, following the lead of their presidential candidates during the 1988 election year, passed an electoral reform that established the direct election of mayors and governors for the first time in 1989; this was seen as a move away from the hierarchical discipline typical of partyarchy. What fewer know is that few party leaders besides the presidential candidates were happy about this reform. They set about to nullify its effects immediately by reasserting tight cogollo control over nominations to these offices. AD was also primarily responsible for stalling and eventually shelving a constitutional reform bill that grass-roots organizations had succeeded in putting on the agenda in 1992. The two parties flirted with reform in 1993 by nominating for president a mayor and a governor who had genuine local grass-roots support and who advocated greater openness and participation and economic liberalism. But when both candidates lost in 1993 -- the first time neither AD nor COPEI had won the presidency in a fair election -- other party leaders systematically marginalized these candidates and purged hundreds of their supporters from the ranks. The AD candidate, Claudio Fermín, was eventually expelled by his party; President Pérez was impeached in 1993 and AD expelled him while he awaited trial. By 1998, COPEI had no viable presidential candidate of its own and so backed one, then another, independent. AD's top boss, Luis Alfaro Ucero, forced the party machine to nominate him for president and ran a doomed race in 1998 even when his own party dumped him two weeks before the vote. AD and COPEI contributed only 9.05 and 2.15 percent of the valid votes, respectively, to the independent candidate they both backed in the end, Henrique Salas Römer.
The presidential election of 1998 that brought Hugo Chávez to the presidency was therefore the culmination of a fifteen-year process of traditional-party decline. Chávez did not destroy the old parties; rather, he filled a political vacuum. His promises were perfectly tailored to fill this particular void. His ultimate announced goal was to restore prosperity to the country -- to stop the waste and corruption that Venezuelans believe to have been siphoning off their wealth, and to distribute it fairly among all citizens. But his means to that goal squarely targeted the traditional parties, which he indicted for creating the mess and accused of standing in the way of the necessary reform. "We are being called to save Venezuela from this immense and putrid swamp in which we have been sunk during 40 years of demagoguery and corruption," he proclaimed in his inaugural address. 16 Although AD's popular support had already diminished and COPEI was on the verge of extinction, their militants were believed to be entrenched still in the congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the electoral council, and state and municipal governments. He promised to remove these corrupt politicians from power and replace them with honest, hard-working, patriotic -- and frequently, it turned out, military -- citizens. Rooting out the corrupt partisans would require a full-scale assault on the existing democratic institutions, and the tool Chávez proposed to carry out this political revolution was a constituent assembly.
<http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/com01/com01.pdf> *****
Abstention has grown in the USA to an even greater extent than in Venezuela in the midst of the pre-Chavez and pre-Bolivarian crisis, but the Democratic Party here is far from collapsing in in a fashion similar to AD's, though it might in the future. What is to be done in the meantime? No electoral participation? -- Yoshie
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