CARACAS, Venezuela—After five years of striking, plotting coups and crying fraud against leftist President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's opposition leaders on Sunday may have scored their first victory—by accepting defeat.
Chavez's re-election win over Manuel Rosales, a state governor, gives him six more years to deepen his "socialist revolution" in the OPEC nation, but the opposition showed it is a united force that can curb the anti-U.S. leader.
Although the ally of Cuban President Fidel Castro swept more than 60 percent of the vote and won Rosales's home province of Zulia, he will increasingly face an opposition ready to challenge him at the ballot box rather than seek to topple him by force.
"We recognize they beat us today, but we will continue the fight," Rosales, 53, told his dejected supporters, who represented about 40 percent of the electorate. "Democratically we will win, democratically we will triumph."
In the last two national elections, the opposition accused Chavez of rigging the vote and either pulled out or rejected the results.
But Rosales' quick concession after smooth voting defied Venezuelans' fears of post-vote chaos and signaled more political stability in one of the world's top oil exporters.
The opposition in August united behind Rosales after years of squabbling over spectacular failures like a bungled coup in 2002, followed by a costly two-month oil strike and then an unsuccessful recall referendum.
Those efforts to remove him ultimately benefited Chavez, who acknowledges he thrives on confrontation and ended up with an image among many of his supporters of invincibility.
"With last night's words the opposition is closing the door on the games of 2002—the strikes, the attempted coups—and opening the door for responsible politics," said Ricardo Sucre, a political science professor at Venezuela's Central University who worked on the Rosales campaign.
"There is an important political base that gives us strength to compete," he said.
Chavez Exposed
With no legislators in Congress and no national elections for years, Rosales' challenge will be to keep the opposition together to fight Chavez.
On Monday, opposition leaders huddled to plot how to block him fulfilling his campaign pledges to scrap presidential term limits and unify his various political groups, which they say show his ambitions for a single-party state like Cuba.
Chavez cast the vote as between him and President George W. Bush, who he says backed the opposition's coup.
But Rosales managed to focus debate on the incumbent's weak performance on crime, unemployment and housing.
By promising direct subsidies financed by Venezuela's oil industry, which provides 12 percent of U.S. oil imports, Rosales also offered the opposition's first policy alternative in years to Chavez's popular social development crusade.
Chavez has galvanized the nation's poor by spending billions of petrodollars on health and education programs and reviving Latin America's left through a strong alliance with Cuba and open confrontation with Washington.
But he has enraged middle and upper class voters who see him as a fledgling dictator bullying public sector workers to implement his radical policies.
Senior opposition figure Teodoro Petkoff said, "The reality is that around 50 percent of the government doesn't believe in (Chavez's) project, and he can't impose himself on that half."
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