Friday 30 April 2010

Venezuela's density and dense politics




Here you see Venezuela's map showing population density and parliamentary seats for the September 2010 elections. As there is no longer proportional representation -in absolute violation of the constitution- and as the Chavista National Electoral Council has done quite some heavy and shameless gerrymandering, the opposition will have real trouble in getting more than 40% of the seats even if it gets more than 50% of the votes. Quico has written quite a lot about this.

The opposition leaders in Caracas have almost no idea about how to get out of the Caracas-Maracaibo-Valencia hubs. They are lost once they get out of there. Why? They are almost all from Caracas, Maraibo and Valencia and people from there barely pays attention to the rest of Venezuela (I know, I am from one of those cities and most of my friends too). Very few people from outside those areas have some real education and those who do have not been promoted within the oppo parties. The few known faces coming from those "non urban" areas (actually, there are plenty of cities there) who are not old politicians from the IV Republic are mostly Chavistas (hardly any of them with anything but military "education" and most of them actually former IV Republic politicos) or now from the dissident PPT party.

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