By JUAN FORERO
 
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 6 - Pompeyo Márquez, with his shaggy mustache, tuft of white hair and craggy voice, is the new face of Venezuela's opposition movement, and therein may lie the problem.

After the opposition's failed coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez and its four economically devastating strikes, the old dinosaurs of the two political parties that plundered the country for decades and are now in opposition have lost their influence.

The idea now is to have someone with a steady hand and voice - as well as impeccable credentials - reaching Venezuelans as the opposition tries to gain momentum to oust Mr. Chávez, a fiery leftist who has turned Venezuelan political tradition upside down with his policies, in a recall referendum on Aug. 15.

So Mr. Márquez, a former Communist guerrilla and political prisoner, is more often than not the opposition's man on the stump these days.

"People ask, 'After Chávez, then what?' and I say, 'After Chávez we will have the rule of law, respect for institutions and unity,' " Mr. Márquez, microphone in hand, said to wild applause on a recent night before 300 people packed into a restaurant outside Caracas. "We are the future. Chávez just talks about the federalist wars of the past."

But even Mr. Márquez, who until recent months had rarely shared the dais with the country's top opposition leaders, admits his time has passed. He is 82 years old. He took part in his first strike in 1936. His standard speech includes references to his experiences in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.

He may be respected for his honesty and tenacity. But political analysts say that having him serve as one of a handful of spokesmen for the coalition of disparate parties, unions and business executives opposed to Mr. Chávez is another sign of a fractured, stumbling movement that has lacked adroit leadership and a coherent message.

In Mr. Chávez, the opposition faces a messianic figure who is a formidable campaigner, drips charisma and now benefits from sky-high oil prices that are giving his government billions of dollars for popular social programs that solidify his base of support.

But of Mr. Márquez, Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said: "Give me a break - there's no charisma there. In the 40's and 50's, an 82-year-old figure might have been O.K. But Chávez is not 82. He's doing well, he's bouncy. He's got high oil prices. They need someone to go up against him."

Indeed, with their last-gasp chance to unseat Mr. Chávez just a week away, the opposition appears to be unable to gain traction.

"I don't feel that the opposition has connected with the hopes of the people," said Jorge Botti, a businessman and opposition leader. "They may believe there is something better than Chávez, but they have not seen an option."

In recent weeks, some polls have indicated that Mr. Chávez will squeak out a victory in the recall. A victory would probably smash opponents who, before they came up with this campaign, had also tried all manner of illegal means to get rid of him.

The polls - by the opposition and by the government - are often too close to call.

Undecided voters, the so-called ni-nis, or neither-nors, who have no affinity for either side, are the wild cards both sides want to capture.

But what is clear is that Mr. Chávez, who just a few months ago was behind in polls by wide margins, has shot up in popularity and is now within reach of winning.

"The situation for Chávez has no doubt improved, and remember, Chávez as a candidate, the worker of a campaign, is extraordinarily good," said Alfredo Torres, a pollster who works for an anti-Chávez political party. "The opposition has been a disaster in terms of creating more voters against Chávez."

Opposition leaders in the Democratic Coordinator, the umbrella group of 27 political parties and 40 civil organizations, breezily continue to predict victory, though, as their volunteers furiously work out of a small house in the affluent eastern part of Caracas, trying to mobilize voters.

The opposition needs 3.8 million voters - at least one more than Mr. Chávez got when he was elected - out of an estimated 13.9 million to vote yes in the recall, and phone banks have been set up to reach 4.7 million people who, in one election or another, voted against Mr. Chávez or his programs. T-shirts are being printed. "Yes" signs are being made. A door-to-door, get-out-the-vote effort has been unfolding.

"We have an extremely ambitious campaign, logistically challenging, to reach people where they live, where they work," said Jesús Torrealba, an opposition leader.

The opposition is also changing its strategy, ending its personal attacks on Mr. Chávez, whom they have often painted as a dictator. They have also ended their harsh criticisms of the government's popular social programs, from subsidized markets, to neighborhood clinics staffed by Cuban doctors, to literacy classes.

Instead, the opposition's new strategy is to emphasize the increase in crime and a troubled economy, while contending that removing the president from office would unite a polarized country.

"Once the opposition saw Chávez's popularity grow, they decided the strategy could not be to attack Chávez," said Luis Vicente León, who has done polling for opposition groups and says government foes underestimated support for the government's programs. "So they talk about peace, unity, a better future. That's what the opposition adopts as its central strategy."

But the strategy, say some political analysts and opposition members, has not yet had the desired effect.

In the poor districts of Caracas, the opposition is often blamed for the economic free fall of 2002 and 2003, which was set off by strikes aimed at removing Mr. Chávez from power.

Venezuela's poor had been shortchanged by a corrupt, two-party system whose implosion led to Mr. Chávez's election in 1998, and many now feel included in Venezuelan society. They see the opposition not as a new driving force offering a remade society, but rather as a throwback to that dark past.

"There's a sentiment among the people that they will not go back to the past," said Ana María Sanjuán, a sociologist at the Central University in Caracas who is critical of both the opposition and the government. "The opposition has not been effective in changing that image, that they are something different."

In the San Antonio barrio on the poor west side, "No" signs hung from lampposts and the small brick houses built helter-skelter over hillsides. Several residents, in interviews, said they would support Mr. Chávez.

"To me, those people have ignored us, stepped on us," Julio Ramírez, 36, said as he worked the cash register of a new government-run market. "They have not given us a single reason to vote for them. President Chávez has made promises and delivered."

Not everything, though, is going Mr. Chávez's way. The economy is flush with oil dollars, but Venezuela is still trying to extricate itself from its two-year economic cave-in. Poverty has increased, according to many social scientists, and unemployment remains high.

Mr. Chávez has been hedging his bets, say diplomats and political analysts, by laying the groundwork for victory. Voter rolls in recent weeks shot up by nearly 1.5 million as a result of a government drive that gave new identification cards to the poor and citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Colombians, measures that are likely to lead to more "no" votes.

The government has also told the Organization of American States and the Carter Center in Atlanta, monitors for the election, that they will not be permitted to make statements about the process during the voting. At least one electoral official has also suggested that the groups will not be permitted to conduct simultaneous audits at voting booths, as is common practice in most Latin American countries.

But increasingly, government officials are eager for a referendum that, just weeks ago, the administration was doing everything in its power to sidestep. The reason seems to be that the opposition's efforts appear to be coming up short just as Mr. Chávez seems to be peaking.

"For the opposition, things are harder," Aristobulo Isturiz, the education minister and a close aide of the president, said in an interview. "It's much harder now. As we advance, they are in worse shape. A year and a half ago, they were in much better health than they are now."