Wins in times of transition. Actors of popular vocation in the Venezuelan elections 1998

Abstract

The significant regional and national advance of Polo Patriótico (PP) in November 1998, and so overwhelming presidential victory of Hugo Chávez Frías on December, same year, have their explanation on a very complex conditions and causes framework which are ubicated here in two different dimensions. The first one, as backdrop, the persistence of a global crisis context and transition of Venezuelan society along twenty years, and on 1998 that situation became worse on the social and economic aspects because of the oil prices collapse at the world market and the consequent fiscal crisis. The second dimension means the dynamic generated between the institutional and politic actors in the electoral situation, where the emergent groups of popular vocation joint around Polo Patriótico demonstrated a better and major capacity to maintain the concordance with the feeling of the majorities, and they even were favored because of the actions taken by their enemies, those traditional actors or other emergent ones.