The 2013 mayoral election results (4): overall count for the opposition

This one is going to be short. I am just going to list what I was given as the results in town halls depending on parties.  You need to remember that the CNE is not quite done yet, that appeals may come and that many parties are trying to drive the winners to their side.  Those winners, even if they belong to a given party, are quite aware that they got elected with other party votes and do not mind at all to pretend that their links are not that strong, that in fact they are switch hitters of sort.  A concrete example is Baruta in Caracas. Gerardo Blyde may be from UNT (the Zulia local franchise) but he is very aware that in Baruta half of the votes at least are PJ and that UNT only has a share within the other half.  He will kiss and make nice with  PJ whenever it is required.

This is the list, so far, to the best of my knowledge, with my comments.


(1) Voluntad Popular comes across as the winner having the most of the elected mayors, with 18 out of the 76 in this list.  What it can truly claim is that it is now a real party, deserving a real seat in the MUD or whatever will replace it, not because the 18 really but because it is the most nation wide spread party at this time.

(2) AD got 15 and  COPEI con 10. Considering that these were once upon a time the power houses and that AD use its "local" implantation to weigh in the MUD decisions even though it has lost any major city for a long time, we can safely say that their days are not coming back any time soon, the more so that they are now not as wide spread as VP....

(3) UNT has 9 but one is Baruta which truly does not count for much and the rest are mostly in Zulia.  At least they have Maracaibo.

(4) PJ got 8 even though they probably would have been the most voted this time around had they run under their colors.  But PJ has suffered from ill conceived strategies aiming at securing a solid base at the expense of spreading around the country better.  Still, having Sucre, an area that all logic would give to chavismo is a mark of PJ abilites once it gets a better perspective of what is really at stake in the country.

(5) ProVe with 3 in Carabobo or around is a dying ember considering all the promise it had in 1998. ABP lone seat is really the lone vehicle of Ledezma.  ABP cannot really use for self for self promotion beh it the biggest prize of all the weight of parties like PJ and VP who would have made score more than ABP in Caracas.

(6) finally independents and other (dissidence of MUD) scored 12 seats.  Interesting but not necessarily significant in the long run, but it has created some losses for the opposition. Fortunately this has also created problems for the PSUV with its own dissidence so in a perverse way we can call it even.

But beyond whether VP is bigger than AD I think that what we should look into is the tally for the district council which will tell us more about future developments in small districts than the count above. Although too long for the time available to this blogger, I suspect that AD and COPEI still will come on top and have people that they can form for the next municipal challenges that will come, preferably when democracy comes back.

I am not going to discuss chavismo districts because for starters they were appointed candidates, not elected through primaries and thus whatever vote they got do not really belong to the winners the way El Hatillo now may belong to VP or Chacao to PJ or Maracaibo to UNT.  Also their dissidence affected them in Podunck like districts except for Maturin.

Opposition results now being processed, in the final entries we will look at vote numbers and interesting race results.