Hugo Chavez : le renouveau du populisme vénézuélien ?

To approach the problems of populism as a political phenomenon, we chose to take the Latin-American point of view in being interested in the particular case of Venezuela and its President Hugo Chavez. The generalized crisis which, from the Eighties, fell down on the country put a term at forty years of a two-party-system and considerably weakened the model of representative democracy set up by both political parties: Democratic Action and Copei. Benefiting from this vacancy, new political actors, independent of the traditional parties, emerged in the Venezuelan’s political panorama and among them Hugo Chavez. Ex-putschist and uncontested leader of the disadvantaged sectors, he built his victory at the presidential elections of 1998 by using a virulent speech towards the parties and the past political community. Thanks to this technique, Chavez could drew the attention of the poor and the deceived people of the system asserting he was the candidate of the rupture, of the change in favour of a participative democracy and a return to the golden age, inspired by Bolivar, judged more able to lead Venezuela towards a better future. First in order to apprehend the principal characteristics of this charismatic leader, and, after a short study of the Venezuelan’s populism of the Fifties, we will concentrate on the character, then, through his declarations and his writings, we will examine the diagnosis which it carries on the crisis that Venezuela crosses, the nature of its electoral program and, finally, his report/ratio with the people. Thanks to these various research orientations and their analysis, we will see whether Hugo Chavez is or not a populist leader