Both narcissist-Leninist President Hugo Chavez and the opposition claimed victory in Venezuela's key state and municipal elections last week, but a dispassionate look at the voting trends shows that Chavez is gradually losing public support — and faces even harder times ahead.

Chavez claimed a "big victory" after last week's voting, which he had presented to the country as a virtual plebiscite on his government's socialist project. He based his victory claim on the fact that government-backed candidates won 17 of 22 governorships and more than 80 percent of the municipalities. From a strictly numeric point of view, Chavez was right.

The opposition, in turn, claimed a huge victory based on the fact that — despite the Chavez government's legal shenanigans that banned hundreds of popular opposition candidates from running, widespread voter intimidation and massive state resources for Chavez-backed candidates — anti-Chavez candidates won the country's capital and the three most populous states.

Together, the five states and seven state capitals won by the opposition — including Zulia state, the heart of Venezuela's oil wealth — make up the core of the country's political, economic and cultural life. From a political point of view, the opposition won.

So who did really win, I asked Teodoro Petkoff, the publisher of Venezuela's daily Tal Cual, and one of the few Venezuelans I have found over the years to be able to analyze the Chavez phenomenon with a cool head.

Petkoff, a former leftist guerrilla leader, congressman and planning minister in the 1990s, told me there are several reasons to conclude that last week's vote was a victory for Venezuela's opposition.

"Chavez suffered a very important political setback," Petkoff said. "He lost in the most important population centers. And in the key states he won, such as Bolivar, he did so because the opposition was divided." But more important, if we take a step back and look at Venezuela's voting trends, Chavez reached his peak in the 2006 presidential elections, when he won 7.3 million votes, Petkoff said. While the "Chavista" vote did better than in the December 2007 defeat of the Chavez-proposed constitutional changes to allow him to remain in power indefinitely, it only got 5.7 million votes.

"This is one more step in Chavez's gradual decline," Petkoff said, noting that the Venezuelan president has been able to prevent an even steeper political decline thanks to the country's recent oil export boom. "Chavez continues to be the country's most important political figure, but the opposition is gaining ground." Two leading Venezuelan pollsters, Alfredo Keller and Oscar Schemel, told me in separate interviews that Venezuela's voting trends definitely show an erosion of Chavez's popularity after 10 years in power.

Chavez won 54 percent of the total vote in the 1998 presidential elections, 60 percent in the 2000 presidential elections, 59 percent in the 2004 referendum on his rule, 60 percent of the vote in the 2004 state and municipal elections, 63 percent of the vote in the 2006 presidential elections, 49 percent in the 2007 constitutional referendum, and 52 percent in last week's elections.

"Chavez's most glorious moment was in the 2006 presidential elections, which he had vowed to win with 10 million votes," said Keller, of the Keller and Associates polling firm. "Instead, he only got 7.3 million votes in 2006, and he hasn't been able to reach that figure ever since." Schemel, of the Hinterlaces polling firm, says there is growing discontent with Chavez's confrontational style, as well as with his government's inefficiency and corruption. "The period of social revenge is wearing out," Schemel said.

My opinion: Barring a major recovery of world oil prices — something that is very unlikely to happen in the near future — Chavez will continue going downhill.

Corruption and government handouts — not ideology — are the grease that lubricates Chavez's political machine, and both will be in increasingly short supply following the collapse of world oil prices from $146 to $54 a barrel in recent months.

If the Venezuelan opposition learns the key lesson from last week's results — it won where it ran united and lost where it ran divided — it will have a good chance of continuing gaining ground in the 2010 congressional elections, and maybe of ousting Chavez in the 2012 presidential elections.

As the voting trends of the past decade show, growing numbers of Venezuelans are realizing that Chavez has wasted the country's biggest oil boom in recent memory on an insane ego trip.

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132; e-mail: aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com.