Sunday's recall referendum in Venezuela has reproduced rather than resolved the country's deep cleavage between supporters of the radical populist President Hugo Chavez, who claims a substantial victory, and his opponents who say it is a fraud.
The progress made from previous attempts to get rid of him by coup or general strike to this use of a constitutional mechanism should not be obscured by arguments about the count. International observers have endorsed the political process of the campaign and the official result. There were sufficient checks in place to detect the malpractice on a gigantic scale necessary to reverse Mr Chavez's 58-42 per cent margin of victory in a high poll.
The result means he will continue to rule Venezuela, whose oil wealth and political confrontations give it a distinctive position in international affairs. Assuming he can weather another round of intransigent opposition from the country's business and landed elites, in alliance with a disaffected middle class, Mr Chavez seems assured of another presidential election victory in 2006, which would keep him in power until 2012. That perspective, based on the enthusiastic support of the poor and marginalised, is what appals his opponents. They say Mr Chavez has squandered the oil wealth and endangered democracy by stoking class polarity. He turns the criticism back on them, often with good reason.
In practice, his policies, while certainly unprecedentedly redistributionist in the Venezuelan context, stop well short of the socialist programme feared by his adversaries. Mr Chavez has encouraged multinational companies, done a deal with Washington on oil supplies and encouraged popular political and economic engagement and participation by renewing democratic access and street markets. His objective is to install a welfare state in a country quite lacking in such social support mechanisms. He has had the confidence (and lately the oil revenues) to criticise Washington's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and to give a vocal lead to a gathering Latin American disenchantment with US dominance.
Mr Chavez's direct appeals to supporters through television, abrasive and vivid oratory and strategic political innovations are necessitated by a need to bypass the elite's monopoly of media and state institutions rather than by a conviction that representative democracy should be replaced. Within such a deeply polarised system such distinctions are easily obscured at home and abroad. Mr Chavez will now have to convince sympathisers as well as critics that he can use this victory constructively in what could be a long period in power.