How to be a mad dictator

Gordon Brown was right not to go to Lisbon at the weekend, but even so, there was something marvellous about seeing Robert Mugabe being Merkelled in the flesh by the German Chancellor. There, impassive, he was forced to sit while Frau Angela told him, in front of 70 African and European leaders, what a shower he was. Whether it improves anything or not, is another matter, but it felt good.

Four weeks earlier there had been a rather similar moment during the Ibero-American summit in Chile. Hugo Chavez, the populist President of Venezuela, had been laying about him with his characteristic lack of restraint. Jose Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, was, according to President Ch�vez, a fascist, and, he added, “fascists are not human. A snake is more human”. When the current Spanish PM - an opponent of Mr Aznar's - objected to this abuse, Chavez continued to shout. It was at this point that the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, leant forward and told Chavez to shut his big, fat, sloppy gob. My Spanish is poor, but it was something like that. JC's admonition has become a popular ringtone around the world.

This symmetry appealed to me because, though Chavez's Venezuela is not yet anything like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I cannot help thinking that Mugabe is Chavez's possible future, and that the 83-year-old former liberation fighter is the former general's Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Mugabe, like Chavez, took power after elections that were widely agreed to have been fairly conducted. Over time his governing philosophy came to consist of an economic nationalism underpinning a state socialist system, mobilised by exploiting resentment towards a privileged minority (the whites), treacherous elites (journalists) and interfering foreign powers (Britain).

To varying degrees in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the same national-Left populism is today in power. Industries are nationalised, oligarchies are excoriated, journalists are traitors and behind every reversal and problem is the demonic power of the Great Gringo in the White House. Powers are sought by the populist presidents, which, while they are argued to enhance the power of the people, unarguably enhance the power of the president.

The week before last, by a small margin, the people of Venezuela refused Chavez the extension to his powers that he had sought. Encouragingly, Chavez seemed to concede with good grace. Impeccable grace, actually, saying: “I recognise the decision a people have made.” A week later and more ominously the President was describing the people's decision as “a shitty victory, and our - call it, defeat - is one of courage, of valour, of dignity,” adding: “We haven't moved a millimetre and we won't.” Several times now he has seemed to suggest that the proposals, in some form, will return. “This Bolivarian Republic will keep getting stronger,” he predicted.

Incidentally it is almost always bad news when the word “Republic” is preceded by an adjective. Ask those who have dwelt in Democratic, People's or Islamic Republics.

Before the Venezuelan vote there had been a convocation of British Signaturistas lining up behind Citizen Chavez. Exuding a reflexive sigh of admiration for the Bolivarian Revolution were the inevitable Pinters and Loaches, as well as Jon Cruddas, MP, who ought to know better, and Ken Livingstone, who never does. Anticipating a “Si!” vote, however, and demanding that the international community live with it, these progressives now contemplate the possibility that its is Chavez who cannot live with the result.

Of course, this may turn out to be wrong, but Mugabe suggests the trajectory: start with foreign sequestration, use the proceeds for internal bribery, watch the economy collapse and blame first the outsider and then the traitor. Finally, watch your people starve.

And Mugabe also suggests the trajectory of the apologists. There's a new dawn, shiny new clinics, optimism in each eye, power to the people and expropriate the expropriators. And if there are problems, such as a shortage of powdered milk in Caracas, then, according to Richard Gott, of The Guardian: “No one knows for certain if this is the result of opposition manoeuvre and malice, or of government incompetence.” Seventy years on and the class traitors are still putting glass in the worker's butter. Possibly.

But, as Julia Buxton, of Bradford University, reminds us, we must not judge Bolivarian democracy by our own lights. According to her there is a difference between “popular perceptions of democracy on the ground in Venezuela, and ‘elite' perceptions, articulated by the media and US ‘democracy-promotion' groups”. “Venezuela,” she explains, “cannot be understood through the lens of liberal democracy,” because democracy itself cannot be “judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy.” The implication here is the superior development of some other kind of democracy.

So Professor Buxton might have added that: “It is the people themselves, who are incessantly called upon to participate personally in the decisions, not merely by expressing opinions about them in innumerable popular meetings; not merely by voting for or against their exponents at recurring elections; but actually by individually sharing in their operation.” In fact this was Sidney and Beatrice Webb on the Russia of 1936, headed by a Stalin who, in a familiar inversion, the Webbs regarded as being more collegiate than the British Prime Minister. “A shrewd and definitely skilful manager,” as they described him. Or was that Gott on Chavez?

The other day I was asked if, given what had happened since, it had been wrong to support the Lancaster House agreement that led to majority rule in Zimbabwe. The problem was, of course, that it came too late. Mugabe was partly made possible by the conditions that created him: racism, colonialism and tribalism. So in South America the conditions for Latin Mugabeism were partly created by rampant exploitation, racism and the support given by the US to “our bastards”.

The alternative to Mugabeism will not be a return to the status quo ante, but - as in Chile - the painful and compromising development of good old, boring old, liberal social democracy. You know, with votes and MPs and stuff.