Rapping Chávez launches coalition year before vote

Jiving to rap music and vowing a "thrashing" in Venezuela's vote exactly a year away, President Hugo Chávez resuscitated a left-wing political coalition on Friday that he hopes will propel him to re-election.

The 57-year-old socialist leader is convalescing after four rounds of chemotherapy following cancer surgery in June.

Yet he managed to dance beside young Venezuelan rappers at the start of a ceremony to launch the "Great Patriotic Pole."

"Long live Venezuela! Long live hip-hop!" laughed Chávez, a consummate political showman who also tossed a baseball for cameras last week to deny a US media report that he had been rushed to hospital for emergency kidney treatment.

In power for 12 years, Chávez has revived the Patriotic Pole in an effort to shore up support ahead of an Oct. 7, 2012, election that is shaping into a close and fascinating tussle for control of South America's biggest oil exporter.

Chávez had himself sidelined the movement in the past, but now wants it to be his flagship electoral coalition, grouping the ruling Socialist Party with various grassroots movements and other smaller parties such as the Communists.

"This is a milestone in the course of the socialist revolution," he said during a ceremony at his Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas.

Taking advantage of disunity in the opposition and drawing popularity from education, health and other social initiatives in slums, Chávez has won all but one of about a dozen national votes during a rule that has transformed Venezuela.

The charismatic former soldier, who idolizes Cuba's Fidel Castro and has nationalized large parts of the OPEC member's economy, predicts a win next year with more than 60 percent.

"We're going to give the bourgeoise a thrashing!" he said in familiar rhetoric, urging supporters to achieve a record 10 million votes for him next year.