After months of confusion and warring egos, the anti-Chavista opposition has agreed on a unitary candidate: leader of the party Un Nuevo Tiempo and current governor of the state of Zulia, Manuel Rosales. Formerly of Accion Democratica—one side of the old oligarchic bipartisanism—Rosales is one of only two escualido governors. Rosales has been accused of late of new efforts to destabilize the country and the Chavez regime.

Prior to yesterday, Rosales had stood as a slight frontrunner for the opposition—showing 21% in a recent survey—but was awaiting a ruling from the electoral commission as to whether he would need to resign as governor in order to run. They ruled instead that he need only appoint a temporary replacement, after which the remaining candidate—the foreign-educated Julio Borges of Primero Justicia (15% in the survey)—dropped out of the race in what was meant to be a unifying gesture.

A week ago, the other major candidate Teodoro Petkoff—a figure whose political opportunism seems to know no bounds, having moved from guerrillero in the 1960s to social democrat in the 70s and 80s to neoliberal member of Rafael Caldera’s cabinet in the 1990s—also dropped out of the race, due most likely to his pitiful showing in opinion polls (5%). It should be noted that a whopping 41% claimed not to know who they support and 10% didn’t answer the question.

The opposition has long lacked any sort of coherent platform upon which to oppose Chavez: they generally hope to "clean up" political institutions, especially the electoral system, and to improve social welfare (difficult to out-Chavez Chavez on the latter). This programmatic difficulty is visible in Rosales’ provisional program: he wants to maintain the "Missions," the central element of the Bolivarian Revolution which fight literacy, provide free health care and education, etc., but wants to "make them better." Moreover, he adds the harebrained scheme of direct payouts of between $280 and $465 a month to families from oil revenue, a sort of bizarro program for self-help through direct state financing.

This isn’t to say that there are no programmatic differences. Rosales: "We believe that private property is something sacred pertaining to human beings."

An interesting side effect of this process is the undermining of the nominal "NGO" Sumate that had been planning to hold a primary next week. Sumate’s leader, Maria Corina Machado, has met directly with the Bush administration, and has been more or less accused of treason for accepting U.S. government funds from the National Endowment for Democracy. Sumate’s "NGO" status allows us to see the limits of the category and the error of equating "non governmental" status with neutrality of any sort.

Some of the opposition were critical of Sumate’s proposed primary, with Petkoff deeming it authoritarian and comparing it to the golpista decree (known affectionately as the carmonazo) which appeared after the 2002 Carmona coup and dissolved all representative organs of the government (a decree which Machado is alleged to have signed, alongside Rosales). For now, Sumate’s power grab has failed and they have cancelled the primaries, but alongside a demand to "broaden the platform" of Rosales.

It’s difficult to say what the future holds for Rosales and his Nuevo Tiempo, an organization which won only 3 assembly seats in 2000 and boycotted the 2005 elections. What is easy to see is that he’ll lose the presidential election: a recent poll gives Chavez 55.5% to Rosale’s 3.8% (although these numbers admittedly include multiple opposition candidates). After the 10 million votes, however, who knows.

UPDATE: Of course, they don’t all agree. Accion Democratica has come out in favor of abstention, which seems to be splitting their miniscule party… The secretary general has called the other opposition candidates "drunks fighting over an empty bottle," but this comes from someone whose political bottle has been well empty for years… And then there is a stand-up comedian who goes by the title of "El Conde del Guácharo." Relatively unknown, but given that Rosales’ 3.8% can be compared to a 17% vote for "someone unknown," maybe the Count has a good chance of destroying the unitary candidacy. One can only hope.

UPDATE 2: The Conde del Guácharo, while claiming to be for neither Chavez nor the opposition, has announced that he will pull out in November if it looks like Rosales has a better chance of defeating Chavez. Hmmm…

UPDATE 3: The call for abstention from the December 3rd election seems also to be splitting Borges’ Primero Justicia party, as reported at Aporrea.org. Meanwhile, Bandera Roja (Red Flag)—a far-left communist party (or far-right, depending on how much you like Albanian anti-revisionism) for which Chavez has never had any love (he claims to have been partly motivated by seeing the results of their "terrorist" attacks on military posts in rural Venezuela)—is also supporting abstention, but their voting leverage is rather small, and even more so since joining the right….