Hugo Chavez wins — what now?

Hugo Chavez is declaring victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum with 58% of the vote. His opponents are declaring a “gigantic fraud.” Daniel Davies has a nice summary of Chavez’s post-referendum conundrum over at Crooked Timber: [T]here is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Hugo Chavez is declaring victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum with 58% of the vote. His opponents are declaring a "gigantic fraud." Daniel Davies has a nice summary of Chavez's post-referendum conundrum over at Crooked Timber:

Hugo Chavez is declaring victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum with 58% of the vote. His opponents are declaring a “gigantic fraud.” Daniel Davies has a nice summary of Chavez’s post-referendum conundrum over at Crooked Timber:

[T]here is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.

Davies’ analysis leads to an interesting corrollary affecting the U.S. presidential election. Gas prices are one of the few economic indicators that voters care about deeply. If the Chavez result causes gas prices to fall, one has to assume it would benefit Bush and hurt Kerry. Hugo Chavez providing a political boost to George W. Bush? We certainly do live in interesting times. UPDATE: The Organization of American States and the Carter Center announced that, “their results agree with the preliminary results announced by the ‘Electoral National Council’ on the presidential recall referendum.”

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

Tag: Theory

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