IN Pakistan, the results of referendums called by dictators are well known in advance. In 1984 and again in 2002, military rulers sought to legitimise their dictatorships through such polls. The people responded to Gen Ziaul Haq’s quest for popular approval by ignoring it.

In the official results, however, the turnout of ten per cent or so was elevated into the ’90s, and the approval rating was purportedly close to 100 per cent. No one with an ounce of sense took this supposed verdict at face value.

In 2002, General Pervez Musharraf at least had the grace to acknowledge that fraud had been perpetrated. But it was dismissed as a marginal event, and did not prevent him from claiming overwhelming popular support for his unconstitutional autocracy.

In the light of precedents such as these, what is one to make of the referendum in Venezuela ten days ago, whereby a raft of proposals by President Hugo Chávez and the nation’s legislative assembly was narrowly defeated, and Chávez promptly went on air to congratulate his opponents?

He obviously wasn’t pleased. Equally obviously, the result wasn’t manipulated. This tends to detract from the mainstream western perception of Chávez as a dictator — even though he has won five times as many electoral contests as George W. Bush, and done so each time with a great deal more credibility than his counterpart in Washington.

One significant reason behind his loss this time round was the impression created by the western media — and seconded by much of Venezuela’s media, which is privately owned and bitterly anti-Chávez — that the referendum was essentially an attempt by Chávez to indefinitely perpetuate his rule.

The Venezuelan president, whose tendency to talk too much often gets him into strife, may well have contributed to this impression by suggesting variously that he would like to stay on as president until 2031 or even 2050 (when he would be in his late 90s), without adequately emphasising that even one more term would depend entirely on re-election in 2013.

What Chávez was seeking in the Dec 2 referendum was the right to stand for election beyond two terms. There is something to be said for term limits and the form they take in the United States, but it’s worth pointing out that the concept is alien to a large number of universally acknowledged democracies, including most European countries, where a head of state or government has the right to seek re-election as many times as the voters are willing to countenance his or her candidacy.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as the elections are free and fair, as has clearly been the case in Venezuela since 1998, when the country first chose Chávez as its president.

Chávez sought to remove term limits on the grounds that no one is better equipped than him to guide his nation towards 21st-century socialism.

A large number of Venezuelans may agree with him, but if it is indeed the case that what the president has dubbed the Bolivarian revolution cannot satisfactorily proceed without him at the helm, then that is a grievous shortcoming that needs to be addressed, and the outcome of the referendum may well provide an impetus for this.

Revolutions whose fortunes are too closely linked to a single personality are more liable to find themselves in trouble than those that are collectively entrenched.

Chances are that Chávez’s frame of mind on this topic is strongly influenced by the example of Cuba under Fidel Castro. Even in that case, however, although Castro’s personality has no doubt played a crucial role in sustaining the Cuban experiment, the reverse side of the coin is the widespread assumption that the revolution won’t outlive its progenitor for long. The validity of this supposition may be dubious in the case of both Cuba and Venezuela, but Chávez would do well to be guided not only by Castro’s achievements but also by his mistakes.

Extreme longevity in power is rarely a virtue, even when the motivating factor is broadly benign.

The removal of term limits and the extension of the presidential term from six years to seven were among 69 proposals presented to voters, who had a choice between accepting or rejecting the package in its entirety. Almost 51 per cent of the votes went against Chávez, who had made the mistake of suggesting that the result would effectively be a vote of confidence — or no-confidence — in his regime.

That is not how the majority of Venezuelans saw it. A year ago, 63 per cent of them re-elected Chávez as their president; only a relatively small fraction of them have defected to the opposition. The referendum was defeated because an estimated three million generally pro-Chávez Venezuelans decided not to vote at all.

This appears to have been a consequence of confusion rather than apathy or hostility. The government evidently made a hash of explaining to the public why the reforms were necessary, and why this particular method was chosen to push them through, given that legislative approval would have sufficed for most of the measures.

Chances are that Chávez thought popular assent would endow the changes with greater legitimacy, given that the legislature is overwhelmingly chavista because much of the opposition boycotted the 2004 parliamentary elections.

Many of the measures included in the referendum package were relatively uncontroversial: reducing the length of the working day from eight hours to six, outlawing all discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, and guaranteeing state pensions for workers in the informal economy (such as housemaids and street vendors) are rights that would be the envy of workers anywhere in the world.

But putting these to a referendum was not a constitutional requirement and, in retrospect, it would have made more sense to leave such reforms to the legislature, combined with a more coherent pursuit of the trickier ones.

It is hard to tell the extent to which the disparate opposition’s partly US-funded propaganda campaign — which featured any number of absurdities, including the threat that the measures would enable the government to divest ordinary folk of their homes as well as their children — affected the popular mood. It may have gained traction because of the volume and complexity of the official proposals. Chávez has suggested that he intends to try again.

Venezuela is still largely a capitalist country. Although considerable progress has been made in combating poverty, illiteracy and ill health, a great deal more needs to be done in the face of bitter opposition from bourgeois interests.

In his commendable pursuit of an alternative to the neo-liberal model, Chávez cannot afford to lose the confidence of his constituency.

In this respect, apart from reaffirming the Bolivarian republic’s democratic credentials, the setback of Dec 2 may well turn out to be a positive turning point, if the mistakes that preceded it are not repeated.

That includes Chávez’s tendency towards overblown rhetoric, whose entertainment value isn’t matched by its political effectiveness.

The popular response to the referendum result, meanwhile, was perhaps best summed up by a 33-year-old bus driver, Pedro Luis Urbina, who told The New York Times’ correspondent: “I’m celebrating because ‘no’ won, but I still have President Chávez.”

The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com