(AFP) – Aug 24, 2007

CARACAS (AFP) — Lawmakers Friday launched a national campaign for constitutional reform to consolidate President Hugo Chavez's power and socialist agenda that a weak and splintered opposition seems powerless to stop.

With Chavez loyalists taking up all 167 seats of the single-chamber legislature, the constitutional reform is assured passage before it is put to a referendum the National Election Board (CNE) has set for December.

Lawmakers swore in the first 400 volunteers of an 80,000-strong army that will canvass support in the referendum for the amendments to the 1999 constitution Chavez is seeking, including an end to presidential term limits.

With no opposition lawmakers in the way of three procedural votes the reform package faces in the legislature -- the first of which passed earlier this week -- the anti-reform group can only hope to sway Venezuelans in their favor.

Opposition parties closed themselves out of the National Assembly when they boycotted the 2005 legislative elections, and have since struggled to form a cohesive bloc to counter Chavez' stranglehold on power.

"In real life, we can't invent a movement that doesn't exist," said Tal Cual newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff. "The (opposition) parties have been reduced to corpuscles with limited impact."

The opposition failed to get a debate in the legislature on constitutional reforms, and failed again to have the proposed changes -- in 33 out of the constitution's 350 articles -- voted separately in the referendum. The CNE Friday decided the reforms will be voted "up or down" in their entirety.

Vice President Jorge Rodriguez was boastful Friday at a massive political rally: "I have no doubt at all that we're going to sweep in December."

So confident is the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela that it launched its vote "Yes" campaign for the referendum before lawmakers have signed off on the reforms -- the next two votes are expected by November.

The reforms the opposition has denounced as a "fascist" plan modeled after Cuba include lengthening the presidential term to seven years -- it was extended from five to six years in the 1999 constitution Chavez pushed through in his first mandate.

The reforms would also end autonomy of the country's central bank and put its international reserves under the president's control, and tighten presidential control over regional governments.

It would also consolidate the military as a new, unified fighting force that Chavez has said would be "patriotic and anti-imperialist" in nature.

After eight years in power, the constitutional reforms would crown Chavez's vision of "21st Century Socialism" he announced after he was elected to his second term in December.

While Chavez is unconcerned with opposition politicians he calls nostalgic "oligarchs" aligned with Washington, he does face some convincing work with the public who turned against him in April when he closed down the popular opposition RCTV television channel.

Students mobilized massive demonstrations -- the first in decades -- to protest the shutdown, but the movement has all but fizzled out with the summer school holidays.

Chavez's popularity fell from 54 percent after the December election to 35 percent in May, at the height of the protest movement, but has since risen to 45 percent, according to a Hinterlaces poll taken Wednesday.

The poll also showed that public opposition to his constitutional reform plan has dropped to 54 percent from 63 percent in July.

Petkoff, 60, said the biggest challenge for the opposition in the upcoming referendum was to keep abstentionism to a minimum. "We need to defeat this primitive feeling that 'we don't need to vote ever again.'"

He confessed, however, that it will be an uphill battle.

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