 Today, we are going to discuss the elections in Venezuela. And we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed, well-known commentator on international affairs. Welcome, Ajaz. Thank you very much. This was said to have been one of the closest of the four elections, which Javiz contested and won. Reports have put his margin of victory at 54 to 46 or thereabouts. But of course, numbers don't always tell the story. What do you think has been the impact on the electorate? How has the election played out? And perhaps more importantly, what's the nature of the mandate that Hugo Chavez has received? Well, the margin of victory is 11 percent, basically, which is less than it has been. There is a leader who has been in power for 13 years, and this is for another seven years. So the opposition was hoping that there would be a great fatigue factor. 11 percent is low only by Chavez's standards, not by world standards. Where else this would be considered a sweep, considering that the entire international media, that is to say Western media, had been saying that it is very close, Zilik, the head of the World Bank, has actually announced that Chavez was going to lose. It's a loser, he had said, and so on. So considering all that. But the deeper thing, Ragu, is that the novel factor in the left governments in Latin America, that is to say certainly Venezuela, but also Bolivia and Ecuador, is that they have not touched private media. Then all the media is owned by the oligarchs. In Venezuela now there is an alternative media based on communities, but the big media of that kind. Secondly, there has been very low degree of expropriation of wealth. So the elections are always against wealth and against media. Thirdly, Andriy Karpe, he's a 40-year-old young man who said, I am not responsible for what previous governments and parties which have been opposed to him have said or done in the past. We are starting anew. I will keep his social programs. I will just make them much more inclusive. Now, I read this as Chavez having captured the hegemonic high ground, where for the first time the opposition, instead of blasting him over this, that and the other, is actually trying to posit itself as left of center, same programs, better tweaked, better organized and so on and so forth. So there's a kind of a sort of contestation of hegemony. Having said that, six million Venezuelans voting against him, against eight to nine voting for him is a division. It is in that sense a fracture, but it's a fracture of a democratic order. And if it had been closer, like the western media had been projecting, and if it had actually been as sharply polarized as was being projected, then the fears that were proclaimed by the western media of violence erupting on the streets may have happened, but it has not, which means that there is a broad acceptance of these. Yes. And for the first time, for the first time in fact, again, I think this is part of Chavez's victory, moral victory, that the opposition conceded it without reservations. Now what you have there is Jimmy Carter whose Carter Center has supervised as observed 92 elections in the world, whose even the Carter Center has gotten Nobel Prize for doing so, says unambiguously that the electoral process in Venezuela is the best electoral process in the world. So this whole business of fraud that people have, they would have screamed fraud. But there were over 200 organizations observing the elections and so on and so forth, and you're absolutely right. The margin being as narrow as it is, neither a question of trying to delegitimize elections nor the question of violence could be posed. In terms of what the Chavez government is now having to do, Venezuela is set to face many challenges on the economic front in terms of health care, in terms of infrastructure, a rising crime graph, several commentators have spoken of the need for Chavez and his team to recast the mold of governance in Venezuela. What do you think of how this government is going to be run in the years to come? In all this, I think the reality, the real stuff is the crime rates, certainly, and to a certain extent corruption. These are real issues. The Ministry of Justice has been one great failure, and the whole sort of civil security situation in Venezuela has been a real failure. Infrastructure today in Venezuela is very deficient, but nothing compared to what it was in the past. Years and years, in fact, decades of oil incomes had meant that roughly 90% of the population lived in these dilapidated cities, and the countryside was emptied, and the infrastructure had collapsed. Rebuilding of that whole infrastructure and then building infrastructure for the kind of development that Venezuela needs to do and can do has the resources to do is a challenge of a completely different order. But it is not that Venezuela is particularly deficient in that there is some sort of a failure of the Chavez government. The Chavez campaign, Chavez and his party came up with a 43-page program, which is a wonderful document because it lays out in detail what the next stage of deepening of the revolutionary process is going to be. And it is markedly different from the last one, which is ending in 2000, the one that began in 2006 and is ending now. They seem to have been working on this very, very much, and it's a very promising document. The most fundamental problem is that when Chavez came to power, there was no political force or a party organization and things of that sort. I have been to Venezuela, I have dealt with bureaucrats there. They were glacially immobile. You have brilliant people who are Chavez people, but to move that bureaucracy was just impossible. And this is what is taking a great deal of time and you need a great deal of innovation in that. Chavez said after the elections that he is not going to compromise with neoliberalism, that he is going to embark on a series of steps to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution. And you touched on some of these aspects. In what way do you see the years to come unfolding an alternative vision, which is coming out of Venezuela as an alternative to modern-day capitalism? And to what extent do you see this influencing developments elsewhere in South America? Well, the very last part I think is one can address very, very quickly. This whole sort of change in Latin America or at least part of Latin America, which includes two of the largest countries, Brazil and Argentina, and the wealthiest, which is Venezuela, has been led by Venezuela. All the visionary things that have come in place, the idea of Latin American integration, the idea of having independence in energy resources, financial institutions, all of it has come from Venezuela. And this is going to progress very, very rapidly. And that is how it has been greeted. President Lula, who's no longer president from Brazil, his statement was that it's not just a victory for the Venezuelan people, it's a victory for Latin American people, and it's a strike against imperialism. Now for Lula to use the word imperialism is not a small matter. So it's going to do all of that on the Latin American scale. It gives, and again, he's not the only one who keeps getting re-elected, Correa got re-elected, Kushner died, but his wife got elected, Lula went through two terms, and then his appointee virtually won the elections and so on, PT in Brazil and so on. So the left is actually Morales, so they're all getting re-elected, and they're getting re-elected on the basis of very precise kind of achievements and in the teeth of media barons inside the country and outside the country, in the teeth of all the wealth that is accumulated wealth of the oligarchies. Now this is a very interesting process where very, very extensive forms of democratization are coinciding with the creation of a basic social infrastructure for what he calls socialism of the 20th century, to which we can come back a little later. So now there are seven years. My sense is that the real problem in Venezuela is the problem of succession. What you have in Venezuela is that the infrastructure of the socialist revolution, the power structures at the base, are being created at a very rapid rate and in astonishingly innovative ways, which is giving millions upon millions upon millions of people daily practical involvement in the building of the revolution from which they benefit directly and immediately. So all of that is happening. And then you have at the top Chavez and his advisers and so on. But what you don't have in Venezuela is leadership structure, which can carry this forward and this becomes particularly important considering the precariousness of Chavez's health. Now I am sure that the wonders of Cuban medicine will keep him alive and well and functioning as long as possible and hopefully through all the six or seven years of his next term. But this question is pressing. And just as there is innovation at the bottom, there I believe needs to be innovation at the top. Thank you very much, Ajaz, for that very insightful look at the situation in Venezuela. Thank you very much.