Caracas - Opposition candidate Leopoldo Lopez wants to make something clear: Hugo Chavez may have been Venezuela's leader since 1999, but he can be defeated in next year's presidential election.
Lopez, 40, belongs to a new generation of opposition leaders that the cancer-stricken Chavez cannot easily dismiss as being part of the “rancid oligarchy” that he used to rail against.
“This idea that some have abroad that the government is invincible is not true,” Lopez said in an interview with AFP and the Venezuelan website Noticias 24.
“We can defeat it, despite all of the difficulties ... and despite all the power and the concentration of public resources that he has,” said Lopez.
A charismatic politician with a winning smile, Lopez comes armed with a master's degree from Harvard and experience as mayor of the upscale Caracas municipality of Chacao.
Other next-generation leaders include Miranda governor Henrique Capriles, 38, who shares Lopez's telenovela-star looks; Pablo Perez, 42, governor of the populous oil state of Zulia; and opposition lawmaker Maria Corina Machado, 44.
In Venezuela, a country starkly divided between Chavez supporters and opponents, the opposition has gathered under the umbrella of the Democratic Unity Table (MUD).
The group “is in the best position of the past 10 years” to challenge Chavez in the October 7, 2012 elections, Lopez said.
Chavez, 57, however remains a formidable opponent. The president maintains a 50 percent approval rating, even though he has been physically weakened after Cuban doctors removed a cancerous tumour from his pelvic area - according to the government - on June 20
in Havana.
The omnipresent Chavez has been forced to decrease the number of public activities as he undergoes chemotherapy treatment, but insists that next year he will be healthy enough to defeat the opposition “by a knock-out.”
The MUD will hold primaries - Lopez said that he will be a candidate - and in February will choose a single opposition figure to face off against Chavez, who is seeking a third six-year mandate.
Lopez says the recipe for victory is an alliance among all the opposition presidential hopefuls.
“There is an agreement that whoever wins in the primaries, we'll all work on the same team - and that is etched in stone,” he said.
Lopez is certain of a victory: opposition candidates obtained more votes than pro-Chavez candidates in congressional 2010
elections, he said, and in 2007 voters cast ballots against a constitutional reform measure that Chavez supported.
Lopez was banned from politics in 2005, when the office of the Comptroller General accused him of corruption.
The case was never brought to trial, and on September 16 the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) declared the Venezuelan ruling invalid. Rulings that result in political punishment are legal only if decided by a criminal court, the IACHR ruled.
An angry Chavez said the “politically motivated” rights court ruling seeks to “stimulate” corruption, and said the case was now in the hands of the Venezuelan Supreme Court.
Lopez is convinced that Chavez must accept the IACHR ruling - Venezuela has ratified a regional human rights convention that serves as the backbone of the court's mandate, and Venezuela has recognised the validity of the court's rulings in the past. - Sapa-AFP