Blogging the democratic revolution
Peru held important presidential debates this weekend, which seemed to show lightly socialist Alan Garcia holding his ground against Chavista favorite Ollanta Humala. Garcia currently has about a 13 percentage point lead. Alvicho at Off Topic has an excellent roundup of all the blog and other news sources on this landmark debate, to give you a feel for how it all went and what it means here.
Two big elections in the troubled Andean states in the next two weeks – Colombia and Peru. Will the voters go Chavista or seek something more economically viable? Will it be a lunge for the messiah-savior of leftwingery or a vote for reality? See what Boz has on the latest polls, as well as doings in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Brazil and others here.
The Peruvians, in the midst of their heated presidential campaign, are having a grand old time lampooning Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who has continuously meddled in their election – promising $3 billion in sewer upgrades for instance if Peruvians elect his promised candidate, Ollanta Humala. As you might imagine, it’s sunk Humala’s candidacy beyond repair. Nobody likes that kind of open voter bribery. It’s patronizing, for one thing. And it’s boosting the campaign of Humala’s opponent, Alan Garcia. It all comes down to Hugo Chavez fundamentally not understanding anything at all about Peru. Peruvians are people who have authentic pride…
Political temperature time for the Americas and Boz has a new collection of polls for the hemisphere this week. The lowdown on Mexico, and rightwing PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon’s growing presidential election lead is one thing, as well as the fascinating political lineup going on in Peru – which makes me think the worst things that can happen probably won’t. In all, a good week, and lots of stuff I haven’t mentioned. Go see what he’s got here.
Need some good news? Click on Boz’s poll roundup for the first bright item on Mexico’s election, where the good guy seems to be squarely in the lead. He’s also got new polls from Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia, plus a suspect poll from Venezuela’s own Hugo Chavez himself. The Chavez poll is interesting, Chavez is claiming he has the support of 60% of the voters. That’s actually a pretty low number coming from a guy like him, I would have expected a good 90% or so. Chavez may be ever so obliquely admitting that he is detested because he knows…
But not exactly in the way you might think. The Venezuelan dictator vowed to recall Venezuela’s ambassador to Peru if Peru’s voters DARED cast their ballot for Alan Garcia instead of his favored Ollanta Humala in next month’s second-round presidential debate. It’s so insane, so guaranteed to backfire, so likely to rally the Garcia vote, so likely to hurt Humala that it makes me think Chavez is on cocaine. Peruvians don’t particularly care one way or another about diplomatic relations with Venezuela. What they do care about is some foreign dictator trying to dictate how they will vote through various…
…of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. It’s a thing of beauty. The latest poll shows that the right-leaning free-market PAN party candidate’s lead is now E-X-T-E-N-D-I-N-G well ahead of AMLO’s. This is the third straight poll showing this awesome trend ahead of the July 2 presidential election. Here’s what’s cool about it: Tonight is the first Mexican presidential debate. Calderon can cream PRI dinosaur candidate Roberto Madrazo easily. AMLO, meanwhile, thinking his two-year-long lead was permanent, opted to sit this debate out. Now, the heavy TV exposure for Calderon against Madrazo is likely to extend his lead even further.…
There’s less than 3% of the votes to be counted and unless something really unusual happens, Alan Garcia will be the second candidate in the runoff for president of Peru, by a narrow margin. Lourdes Flores is in third place, trailing Garcia by 84,832 votes. I hate Garcia’s guts. But not nearly as much as Ollanta Humala’s. The prime difference between the two men is that Garcia, leftist and irresponsible as he is, is nevertheless a democrat. When his term was up in 1990, and he’d made his big mess of the economy, he nevertheless left office. He didn’t entertain…
In the struggle to name a new election board that won’t be as discredited for its pro-Hugo Chavez biases as the last one, a supposedly transparent and fair process is being put into place and supposedly neutral observers are being chosen. This of course is not happening. The candidates are being asked whether they voted or not – a highly loaded question since only 18% of the voters voted in December and the rest of the electorate boycotted the election. If saying they stayed home on election day means they aren’t patriotic (read: Chavista) then the only people who will…
Boli-Nica has a tremendously important piece about the role of the Internet is having on burning down Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s lead in Mexico’s presidential election to be held on July 2. Well, we here certainly don’t like the guy! But more importantly, Boli points out how Mexico’s bloggers are warning, criticizing, exposing and ridiculing the supposedly untouchable AMLO, whittling down the leftist demogogue’s once-powerful presidential lead, which is now down to 3 or 4 points at most and still falling – with a good long three months for it to fall farther. Mexicans can’t stand this kind of nonsense,…
Boz has his weekly polls roundup from around the Americas, and first, the best part: Spanish voters rank Chavez and Castro as rock bottom from among the region’s leaders. Chavez’s trips to Spain, where he made an incredible fool of himself, obnoxious all the way, must have had something to do with this. Castro, meanwhile, speaks for himself. He’s also got updates from Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, all well worth seeing here.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really starting to tumble in the Mexican presidential polls, to be held July 2. He’s still ahead, but now only by 3 or 4 points. And with three months to go before election day, his trajectory is down. Reuters has a new story here showing that for the first time in three years, he’s starting to really look shaky. AMLO is the favored candidate of the Hugo Chavez left in Mexico. But Chavez, ironically, is the main cause of AMLO’s downfall. The more Hugo Chavez talks, the more anti-U.S, rage he spews, the more insanity…
Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent newspaper editor and politician on the left, has said he will run for president against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in December’s election. It’s a fascinating decision. Petkoff is an ex-leftist guerrilla who can’t stand Chavez. He was also a good government infrastructural minister who really got things done. He’s extremely competent, and I don’t care what he claims his political orientation is. He does thing right. Petkoff posts on English-language Venezuelan blogs on occasion and the one striking thing I noticed about him from his posts was his brilliance and confidence, even if I did not totally…
Another day, another 20,000-vote narrowing in the gap between Lulu Flores and Alan Garcia, the two candidates vying for second place in Peru’s electoral race, which will go into a second round next month. Yesterday, Flores was trailing Garcia by 93,000 votes. Today, it’s 71,000 votes. There’s still about 8% of the votes to be counted. If you ask me, I think the odds are starting to go into her favor, if these expat trends continue. She’s behind but she’s also got the momentum from voters. Can it last for eight percentage points? I am starting to cross my fingers.…
According to Peru’s official election results page, the battle for a second-place spot for the May runoff shows that free-market Lourdes Flores is beginnning to sharply gain on disastrous ex-President Alan Garcia. If she can completely overtake Garcia, she will be the one to face Ollanta Humala in May, and may well win. As Peruvian expat votes roll in, there’s now less than a 100,000-vote difference between Garcia and Flores. Garcia’s lead above Flores is just 93,818 votes. A few days ago, it was over 200,000 votes. The expats seem to be making a difference. Lobo en Peru has some…
OK, I have made a mistake. All is not lost for Peru’s best candidate, Lourdes Flores. She may still make the runoff. I misread one of Alvicho’s Off Topic posts on the electoral outcome. He had a headline up about the expat vote, but the tally he posted was for the Peruvian electorate as a whole, not just the expats. That’s why I thought the expats were going for Humala. They probably aren’t. Rici, posting a note at Fruits and Votes pointed this out to me. He says the expat vote is still expected to go mostly for Lourdes Flores…
The expat vote is coming in, the last frontier of vote counting in Peru’s hotly contested election race. As it happens, the Peruvian expat vote pretty much reflects the vote of the home Peruvians – most are going to Ollanta Humala, with the second-highest tally going to Alan Garcia, and free-market Lourdes Flores is left with just slightly less vote than Garcia. What a shame. I am so sad for Peru. CORRECTION: Wrong information, see my update here. That means that come May, Peru will face a stark choice between a leftwing lunatic, Ollanta Humala who has dreams of being…
Now here is something we have been waiting for, Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s take on the wretched electoral situation in Peru, where a leftist Chavista, Ollanta Humala, is in the lead. Vargas Llosa’s got a new essay out, released just minutes ago, called ‘Peru – A Fox Guarding The Henhouse.’ It’s a good neutral analysis of how the votes will likely go and what will likely happen as the electoral situation shapes up in Peru. Read it here.
Today, Mercer released its annual list of the world’s most liveable cities, based on quality of living. I Googled around and finally found a whole list of the study here. I stripped out all the non-Americas cities and just left in the cities that are in Latin America, in the Caribbean, or in U.S. cities with more than half their populations from Latin America and speaking Spanish. Here’s how it all adds up – note how low Caracas ranks, a disgusting thing, given the amount of oil wealth this country has: 55 56 LOS ANGELES, CA United States 98.3 98.3…
You can call it a peculiar kind of poll, but today’s markets are betting that Lourdes Flores may well be able to win the presidential election in Peru. This candidate’s got to fight hard but apparently she can do it. That’s why markets in Peru are up today. The dynamics are curious in Peru. Roughly, they go like this: early polls have always shown that Flores comes in second place in a three-way race with the two leftists, Alan Garcia and Ollanta Humala. But in a two-way race, Flores can defeat Humala. Logic would suggest that the two leftists would…
It doesn’t look good for Peru. Source: Noticiero Digital Today is the first round of the presidential election, and Ollanta Humala, the pro-Hugo-Chavez leftist with a verified personal record as a human-rights violator, is leading in the polls in Peru with 29.6% of the vote. The result is based on an exit poll by Apoyo, a good polling firm. It gets worse. Alan Garcia, the lunatic leftist who ruled Peru during the 1980s and gave Peru 7000% inflation and a near-death experience with the Shining Path, as well as loads of trouble for President Ronald Reagan, is unexpectedly in second…
A new poll shows that Peru’s free-market, free-trade, pro-property-rights, anti-poverty, anti-Hugo Chavez candidate is BACK IN FIRST PLACE ahead of Peru’s polls this Sunday! If it’s accurate, this is great news! Lourdes Flores is once again topping Ollanta Humala in Peru’s presidential race, not a moment too soon. It immediately follows Flores’ willingness to confront and speak the truth about Hugo Chavez, the continent’s worst tyrant (see my post below), and stand up for democracy! Flores at her campaign rally in Lima yesterday. Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! EFE has the breaking story here: Poll: Flores takes lead in Peruvian presidential…
Peru’s free-market candidate for president, Lourdes Flores, is sliding in the polls ahead of Peru’s first-round presidential election on Sunday, but apparently has taken a strong cue from Felipe Calderon’s successful Hugo Chavez ads against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. Aggressively, she’s lashed out against the dictator in Caracas. She’s hammering him as “a danger in the shadows to all Latin America.” Will this win her back votes? We don’t know. But suddenly, Peru’s election is exciting again and it’s only got a couple more days until April 9’s first round. El Universal has the new item, so far…
Conservative PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon, who’s leading or nearly leading the polls in Mexico’s July 2 presidential election, is determined to drive home that his opponent, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is a second Hugo Chavez. I wasn’t sure if he was going to do this – both Chavez and AMLO himself said that he shouldn’t do it, something that I read as signs of panic on both their parts, but I wasn’t sure if PAN saw it the same way I did. After all, PAN had pulled a television ad they ran for a week that had compared…
Source: AP, via Yahoo! Kuwaiti election volunteers in Salwa, Kuwait, during yesterday’s first-ever municipal election that allowed women’s participation. Draw your own conclusions.