On Sunday February the 12, the
long-awaited opposition primary elections took place in order to select
the candidate who will face Hugo Chavez in the presidential elections
due for October this year. Cápriles Radonski, the present governor of
Miranda state won a clear victory with 62% of the vote, compared to only
28.9% for his contender Pablo Perez, present governor of Zulia state.

Last Saturday’s rally in Ireland organised by the Campaign against Household and Water
Taxes (CAHWT) demonstrated clearly that the opposition to the Household
Taxes is likely to be a major thorn in the side of Fine Gael and Labour
over the next period. The immediate problem for the Department of the
Environment, Community and Local Government however is not the 3,000
people who attended the rally at the National Stadium and those who
attended the other rallies. It’s the fact that only 328,201 households
have registered for the Household tax, from a total of more or less 1.6
million.

The cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ can sometimes seem
inapplicable to China, with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
vice-like grip on the political life of the country. But the truth is
that such a system is, for all its appearance of serenity, actually more
like a pressure cooker. Dramatic political events and factional turmoil
can spring up as if from nowhere and in these moments the stage-managed
consensus can suddenly unravel.