The real Chavez is never far under the surface, even Cohn-Bendit knows that

It was not too long until the fake meek words of last Saturday were blown away.  Tonight as a matter of fact when Chavez announced that the enabling law would not be returned for revision at the National Assembly.  In one of his editorials Teodoro Petkoff was sort of looking at Chavez's Saturday performance as a possible sign of more flexibility; but tonight Chavez made sure to let us know that war is all that he has in mind and that the enabling law will be used, among other things, to destroy the rental market and private construction sector.  Considering the more than proven ineptness of the regime at building houses (amazingly also recognized in tonight's cadena by Chaevz himself) we can only suggest to newly married couples to learn to shack it up and tune it down at their parents home.  That, or learning to assemble zinc and cardboard shacks to shag.


If one parable has been proven over and over by Chavez, it is the frog and scorpion crossing the river.  Or in more realistic words, what this blogger tells you over and over: too many chavistas will have to go on trial once the regime is over for them to allow any transition.  Chavez words last Saturday where for the consumption of the foreign press and attending ambassadors, as I noted in the Google news section who listed all sorts of beaming foreign correspondents that Chavez was going to resend the enabling law in May.  But for the Venezuelan public I am surprised that it took until today for Chavez reminding us that nothing had changed.

But there was a delightful moment this week, from the European Parliament, nothing less.  There was a fierce debate as Hungary's prime minster, Orban, fresh from presiding over the enacting of a restrictive freedom of the press law came to present Hungary's plans for Europe as they preside it for the next 6 months.  Hungary and its government have been receiving quite a lot of flack from that law. I am in no position to judge how dangerous it is but my guess is that it is less coercive than the one in Venezuela voted last month but already too much for Europeans to stomach.

Cohn-Bendit, as reported by El Pais in Spain, intervened in the debate with a strong criticism of Orban and accused him of being some European Chavez.  Since Cohn-Bendit is a Green French representative at the European Parliament I took the trouble to find his exact words in French:

"un Chavez européen, un national-populiste qui ne comprend pas l'essence et la structure de la démocratie"

 That is: an European Chavez, a national-populist that does not understand the essence and the structure of democracy.

There you have it, one of the clearest appreciation of chavismo you can find in recent memory, and from someone with leftist impeccable credentials, as far back as May 68.  Real leftist democrats like Liberation and Cohn Bendit were the first ones in France to have discovered the true nature of Chavez, as the right wing French and Le Figaro still manages after all these years to wiggle on occasion, I suppose hoping to help French business get fat contracts....

What I am trying to tell you is that this is big, that if Cohn-Bendit has incorporated anti Chavez rhetoric to the point of spitting it in an angry debate at the European parliament it is because Chavez image in Europe is, well, totally screwed.  Now we are waiting for the last democratic leftward bastion to join the anti Chavez chorus:  too many Liberals in the US who for some reason still cannot seem to make up their mind over Chavez.