Venezuela's president is durable enough to recover from Sunday's polls defeat, but he faces tough economic and corruption issues, writes Tom Hennigan
For the first time since he was elected president in 1998, Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez has lost a popular vote, after the No that voters gave on Sunday to the proposed constitutional changes that would have greatly expanded his power.
For a man dismissed as a demagogue and autocrat by enemies, Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian Revolution - a homemade mix of 21st-century socialism and nationalism - had enjoyed multiple successes at the ballot box during the last decade.
But now that he has suffered his first electoral defeat, his Latin American neighbours and the US will be looking closely to see if he curtails the authoritarian tendencies and diplomatic grandstanding that have accompanied past electoral successes, or if the former coup leader seeks other ways around this democratic check on his revolution.
The first signs pointed towards conciliation. To the surprise of most, Chávez was gracious in defeat, congratulating an opposition that just days before he labelled traitorous, and pointing out that "there is no dictatorship" in Venezuela.
But there was a six-hour delay in releasing the results during which it seems a tense debate occurred within the government about whether or not to accept the electorate's verdict.
According to opposition sources, it was a demand by the military high command that he do so that prompted Chávez's concession speech. There were also hints in the speech that the referendum defeat might not be the end of attempts to change the constitution.
Chávez told supporters his project "remained alive" and hinted that he would look at other ways of enacting the rejected proposals, the most controversial of which was to scrap presidential term limits.
Such means are readily available. He still has emergency decree powers that the legislative assembly voted him earlier this year and an ill-conceived opposition boycott in 2005 means his supporters have near total control over that body.
Chávez has shown a remarkable ability to overcome previous setbacks. He survived a coup which ousted him briefly in 2002, broke a general strike that crippled the country's economy in 2003 and easily saw off a recall vote on his presidency in 2004.
He burst on to Venezuela's political scene in 1992 with a failed coup attempt of his own. Forced to surrender, he then famously told reporters "we have failed, for now", which became the slogan encapsulating his movement's belief in its own eventual victory and one he reprised in Sunday's concession speech.
The power he still wields and this remarkable survival instinct led one former leading chavista turned opponent to warn that Sunday's vote does not necessarily mean the end of the Bolivarian Revolution.
"These results can't be recognised as a victory," said Raúl Baduel, whose links with Chávez go back to his days as a military conspirator and who was later his minister of defence before falling out over the referendum, which Baduel labelled an attempted coup d'état.
Despite such pessimism, Sunday's result is an undoubted boost for a fragmented opposition long demoralised by their repeated defeats. Opposition leaders are now calling for its disparate components to build a credible alternative to Chávez.
But this will be difficult. Many in the opposition are tarred by association with the corrupt oligarchy that ran the country before Chávez took power. At times some of their open hatred of him seems fuelled by racism (Chávez is of mixed African and indigenous race), a strategic blunder in a country where the poor mixed-race majority have long felt excluded from the country's wealth by the much whiter elite.
The reality is that Chávez lost on Sunday not because of the opposition's strength but because millions of his own supporters decided to sit the vote out, pushing his usual healthy margin over the opposition into a small deficit. But that does not mean they are ready to abandon him altogether and support his rivals.
In none of the major votes that the opposition has contested against Chávez has it outpolled the number of abstentions. The No vote on Sunday was less than 30 per cent of all eligible voters. Chávez suffered a defeat but his opponents have a long way to go before they provide a credible alternative.
And Chávez still has plenty of cards in his hands. As well as his emergency decree powers and huge majority in the national assembly, he also has a massive financial cushion, thanks to the record prices for oil, practically Venezuela's only export. Most of Chávez's popularity is due to his policy of redirecting this wealth at the poor through a myriad of social programmes. Thanks to US$30 billion in the bank, there is plenty of spare cash for these to continue.
And yet Sunday's defeat comes at a time when the success and sustainability of the Bolivarian Revolution are questioned as never before. The continent's highest inflation rate and price controls mean that even though the country is awash with money, there are shortages of basic foodstuffs such as eggs, milk and flour. Even oil production is suffering from political strife and mismanagement.
Corruption is rampant among the new Bolivarian elite and its apparatchiks. Combined with the growing economic chaos, it has the potential to be hugely damaging to Chávez, as the pledge to combat the corruption of the old elite was far more influential in getting him elected in 1998 than any promise to turn Venezuela socialist.
All these problems might drain the impetus away from Chávez's revolution just as he seeks to overcome Sunday's setback. Already splits are opening up in the chavista ranks.
The question now is whether Chávez cares to be authoritarian in dealing with all these problems facing his revolution now that there is some uncertainty at the ballot box.
Tom Hennigan is a freelance journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil