Word: referendum
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According to many commentators on Latin American politics, the failure of last week’s referendum on proposed amendments to the Venezuelan constitution represents a welcome reprieve from the country’s (leftward) drift away from democracy. In a December 8th editorial provocatively entitled “Authoritarians in the Andes,” The New York Times celebrated Venezuelans’ rejection of Chavez’s “power grab” ; a few days earlier, our very own paper relayed economist Ricardo Hausman’s call for continued “vigilance?...
...current poll is, in many ways, a referendum on Modi and whether his modernization policies outweigh his reputation for ethnic demagoguery. Sonia Gandhi, leader of the ruling Indian National Congress party, has spent days campaigning around the state and has accused Modi and his party of playing on communal tensions to win votes. The Gujarat government, she said, were "merchants of death" - a charge that Modi and his party say is outrageous. Gandhi's comment and one by Modi that seemed to endorse the controversial police killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a young Muslim man who was allegedly wrongly branded...
...unfortunately not been preserved. Most important now, he argued, is finding a way to join the working class and the more affluent portions of society so that America can move forward without leaving any group of people behind. His hope is that the 2008 election will become a referendum on issues from the ’60s that remain unresolved. Brokaw recalled an anecdote about an interaction with Hillary Clinton. When Clinton asked Brokaw if he had “cracked the code yet,” he replied, “No, I haven?...
...panic set in on Sundayevening when news started to trickle out of Venezuela's National Election Commission, which is dominated by allies of President Hugo Chvez. Referendum returns indicated that Chvez's package of constitutional changes, including the elimination of presidential-term limits, would narrowly lose. Inside the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Chvez--who had yet to lose an election since winning the presidency in 1998--was initially furious. But soon enough, he accepted the loss. And his calm concession did Venezuela--in fact, a whole continent whose leaders have had a habit of defying...
Some adversaries had good words for Chvez. "There's no doubt he brought necessary changes to a very corrupt Venezuela," says Juan Meja, a head of the student movement that led the opposition to Chvez at the referendum. Indeed, it was Chvez's electrifying emergence that paved the way for the election in this decade of other leftist heads of state, like Brazil's Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, Argentina's Nstor Kirchner and Chile's Michelle Bachelet, even if Chvez affects to disdain their moderate, market-oriented socialism. Sunday's humbling results...