Here are some Tweets on the elections in Venezuela.
Le Huffington Post da ganador a Chavez! http://ow.ly/ehWtL — The Huffington Post calls it for Chavez.
Chavez supporters party on anticipated win in Venezuela vote
El Pais says he is leading by a million votes according to the ‘official’ results. “Las filtraciones del Consejo Electoral dan más de un millón de votos de ventaja al presidente”.
Intrade has closed predicting an almost certain Chavez win.
Looks like Chavez’s supporters were right to celebrate early. Hmm. What does that teach the world, if anything?
Cory lost to Marcos as well in the last election he supervised. It didn’t buy him much time. He was gone in a few months.
In late 1985, when President Marcos called for a snap election, Aquino ran for president with former senator Salvador Laurel as her vice-presidential running mate. After the elections were held on February 7, 1986, and the Batasang Pambansa proclaimed Marcos the winner in the elections, she called for massive civil disobedience protests, declaring herself as having been cheated and as the real winner in the elections. Filipinos enthusiastically heeded her call and rallied behind her. These events eventually led to the ousting of Marcos and the installation of Aquino as President of the Philippines on February 25, 1986 through the “People Power Revolution”.
My guess is that Chavez is fatally wounded. Whatever his official votes say he is now hated by the Venezuelan people — or by a lot of them at least. The interesting question now is whether the US administration will support him. Obama probably will. He may hang back a few days until the stink dies down, but it is unlikely that he’ll do any more than nod to the dissenters.
All in all it’s been a good day for the basics of political change. The Left dies hard, but it does die. The most important thing is never to accept its declarations of victory at face value and never give up. It’s not over just because they say it is.
Mr. Erdogan described how an Islamist could participate in the democratic process. “Democracy is like a streetcar,” he quipped. “You ride it until you arrive at your destination and then you step off.” That’s the trouble with people who think they’ve been vouchsafed some fatal vision. They are so convinced of their righteousness that they never consider that they may be wrong.
But reality has other ideas. And we are about to see what happens when fiction meets fact.
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