Tuesday 27 November 2007

Chávez and the EU

Do you want to know how the EU discusses about Venezuela?
You need to take a look at this discussion about the closing...sorry, the non-renovation
of RCTV's licence.

From that discussion came a resolution against the Chávez regime.
You can read about it here.
The basic part is this: "MEPs were divided over some aspects of this issue, with rival resolutions coming from the EPP-ED, ALDE and UEN groups on the one hand, and the PES, Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL on the other. The former was adopted by 43 votes to 22 with 0 abstentions."

The Venezuelan government cried foul and said the vote had taken place when few deputies were present. Still, the vote was perfectly legal: the discussion had been placed on the agenda well in advance, so if less people attended, it was because they did not want to attend. The reason is clear for somebody in Europe: the European Parliament meets part of the time in Brussels and part of it in Strassbourg (I know, it is absolutely crazy and a waste of money). Most eurocrats reside in Brussels, though. The voting had been planned for a Friday morning and at that moment most eurodeputies were already flying home.

If the voting had taken place another day, though, chances would have been that there would be much more support for the resolution than what it got, so the protest by the Chavista diplomats was just noise. They were lucky they got so "many" votes.

Check out who supported (and still support) Chávez here:

Giusto Catania - (GUE/NGL)
Manuel Medina Ortega - PSE Group: it is quite shocking that there are still some people from the PSOE who support the Chávez regime. I will write more on that later.
Sahra Wagenknecht - GUE/NGL Group: There is more on her in the German Wikipedia. I will write about her also later. She is from the extreme left. She joined the SED, the German Communist Party, just shortly before Eastern Germany was falling apart. The SED became the PDS and the PDS became the Linke.
SED in German means Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or Socialist Unified Party of Germany. Does it sound familiar to you?
Georgios Toussas - GUE/NGL, a member of the Greek Communist party.

Most Venezuelans will feel shocked by reading what those people wrote. I will post later some comments here for Europeans to understand what those EU deputies mentioned above are so wrong.

Unlike in December 2006, we will not have this time EU observers to check out the elections. Still, I will be commenting here about the EU's reaction to what is happening in Venezuela and what the different actors in the EU's political spectrum do about it.

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