El Universal’s Roberto Giusti has an insightful interview with a top pollster in Venezuela who’s found that President Hugo Chavez is rapidly sliding in the popular approval polls.

Among many reasons, he’s found that poor people can only be bought off with ‘social programs’ for so long. Chavez also has dropped in a relatively short period of time, to 45% support, partly because most of his programs have not panned out to expectations (e.g., 400,000 Chavez ‘scholarships’ were dangled before the poor, but only 78 were forked out). And about a third of that popular support is purely for practical reasons. That would mean only 30% of Venezuelans are hardcore Chavez supporters – this is what I hear from other Venezuelan sources, interestingly, so I think this finding is significant. It’s a very sophisticated interview, read the whole thing here.

Next door in Colombia, Chavez’s nemesis, Alvaro Uribe, a revolutionary if there ever was one, has public approval numbers that have rocketed to 80%, greater than all past Colombian presidents, with 72% of Colombians seeking to vote for him again. Free markets, not welfare handouts, seem to be the real way to win the peoples’ hearts.

How very wretched and sad for Chavez to realize that Uribe’s popularity is based on his ideas and his courageous leadership, not his soup kitchens, while Chavez has to pay money to get the only support he can muster – and nobody loves him for himself. You can see for yourself here.