The tone of politics in Venezuela has only become rougher since the death eight months ago of socialist president Hugo Chavez, and the rhetoric is becoming even nastier with local elections looming. Chavez made his international reputation through his own confrontational style and aggressive populism. With the approaching December 8 local polls - to elect 340 mayors and 2,400 town councillors - seen as a referendum on the government, Chavez's handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has used both word and deed to press its case against the opposition.
Maduro, 50, slams the opposition as "parasites," "fascists" and "criminals" at every turn. The opposition is hardly mild but has struggled to be heard amid the din made by the powerful, pro-government media bloc. Venezuela's political divisions have deepened since April 14, when Maduro narrowly beat opposition leader Henrique Capriles, 41, in a presidential election. The opposition never acknowledged the result.
Capriles is not quite as strident but attacks Maduro as "corrupt" and a "puppet of Cuba," mainly using Twitter as his platform. "In our history, we had never had anyone this incompetent in Miraflores [the Venezuelan presidential palace]," Capriles said of Maduro. Inflation stands at an annual rate of more than 45 per cent and is expected to end 2013 at around 50 per cent. The price of oil, the bedrock commodity of the Venezuelan economy, has fallen, while the local currency is crumbling against the dollar on the black market.
Venezuelans are facing shortages across the country. In many places, there has been no milk for weeks, while toilet paper and other basic hygiene products have become luxury goods that tap the country's foreign exchange reserves. Chavistas launched the blame game long ago against what they call saboteurs, speculators and bourgeois. To justify nationwide price controls, Maduro accused a "parasitic oligarchy" of plundering the people's assets through speculation. "They want to topple me," he said.
Following Chavez's example, Maduro has alleged a long series of plans for coups and assassination plots. Maduro speaks of an "evil trilogy," with reference to three opposition leaders who seek to topple him with US permission. "Chavez was very coarse too, but he was more creative at it," said Georg Eickhoff, former chief of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's Caracas bureau and now co-ordinator of the foundation's democracy programme in Latin America. "Now, we are dealing with a bureaucratization of coarseness and a mechanization of insult."
The opposition accuses Maduro of leading Venezuela to ruin. Trying to make his mark, Maduro has expelled US diplomats and created a Deputy Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness. Maduro has threatened to put in jail anyone who does not accept the results of next month's election and declared December 8 as the day of "Loyalty and Love" for the "eternal Comandante Chavez."
The socialist majority in Venezuela's unicameral National Assembly passed an enabling act Thursday to allow Maduro to rule by decree to fight an "economic war instigated by the bourgeoisie." Eickhoff called the decree authority a "totally unnecessary" action that mimic's Maduro's mentor. "Chavez often did that. But with or without decrees, it made no difference," Eickhoff said. "Only legislators noticed it, because laws were issued by the president without a parliamentary session." He preducted that the decrees would further sap Venezuela's representative democracy, yet prove inadequate to solve the country's most important problems. "One cannot do away with inflation by decree," Eickhoff warned. "You cannot just ban it."
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