Now It's Round Two; The opposition has hurt Chavez, but can it knock him out?(Hugo Chavez)

Byline: Phil Gunson

For the past year, the political spotlight in Venezuela has been on leftist President Hugo Chavez. The world watched as he tried every means at his disposal to thwart a recall referendum campaign organized by his opponents. He failed. Venezuela's Electoral Council announced last month that, after repeated tries, the opposition had met all the requirements to hold a nationwide referendum on Chavez's administration--and last week the agency said the vote would take place on Aug. 15.

Now public attention turns to the handful of men who lead the anti-Chavez bandwagon, known by the awkward title of Democratic Coordinator, or CD. Political analysts are asking whether the CD's leaders are capable of overcoming their internal divisions and ousting a weakened but charismatic president. Should they formulate a specific governing platform of their own? Will opposition supporters, many of whom distrust their own leaders as much as they dislike Chavez, show up to vote in sufficient numbers? And, perhaps most important, who will rule Venezuela, and how, if Chavez is voted out?

The lack of a leader who appeals to the masses is the opposition's greatest vulnerability. "The most important enemy for the opposition is not Chavez," says Datanalisis pollster Luis Vicente Leon. "It's abstention." According to his firm's most recent figures, almost 60 percent of the country's 13 million registered voters say they oppose Chavez. To revoke the president's mandate--which would be an unprecedented event in Latin America--the alliance must receive at least one vote more than the almost 3.8 million cast for Chavez in the 2000 election. Though the CD has what Leon terms "an excellent base" of about 3.4 million committed voters, it must also mobilize the large, so-called neither/nor segment of the population, who are skeptical of both sides.

The opposition coalition is held together almost exclusively by its members' dislike of Chavez. The group has regularly promised to unveil its own policy platform, and regularly failed to do so. The president has taken advantage of this political vacuum to supply the answer himself. The opposition leadership, he declares, is a group of "fascist, terrorist coup plotters" who obey "foreign masters" (a none-too-veiled ...