CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Divisions in President Hugo Chavez's government intensified Monday with the expected withdrawal of a coalition partner's support for his re-election bid this month.

 The split comes after three former army commanders who helped Chavez stage a 1992 coup attempt also broke away from the president.

 The growing discontent inside Chavez's revolutionary movement, however, doesn't appear to be dampening his chances in the May 28 vote. Polls show he maintains a solid lead over his closest rival, Francisco Arias Cardenas, one of the former fellow coup leaders.

 Leaders of Fatherland For All, one of three parties making up Chavez's ruling coalition, were planning to abandon the government and withdraw their support for Chavez's candidacy.

 The move carried potential international ramifications, since Oil Minister Ali Rodriguez, the current president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, belongs to Fatherland For All. Party leaders said Rodriguez would be free to decide for himself whether to stay in the government.

 The coalition infighting is a result of "struggle for bureaucratic space" and differences over which candidates should be posted in the May 28 vote for local offices, said Tarek William Saab, a key Chavez ally and candidate for Congress. But party leaders said their irritation with Chavez went beyond mundane politics: They said they fear the country's "militarization" and a dangerous concentration of power in Chavez's hands.

 Fatherland For All leaders became irate when, during flooding last December that killed thousands, Chavez went over the heads of local civilian leaders and "tried to militarize" the disaster zone, party leader Pablo Medina said.

 He said similar problems have arisen in the eastern state of Anzoategui, where one of Chavez's generals allegedly disregarded the authority of the local governor.

 Chavez has repeatedly said he doesn't need any party's support as long as the people are with him.

 Since taking office in February 1999, Chavez has done away with the political establishment that ruled the South American nation during four decades of democracy, pushing through a new constitution that eliminated the Senate, increased the power of the presidency and called for new balloting this month to "re-legitimize" most public offices, including the presidency.

 He says radical changes were necessary to rescue Venezuela from corrupt leadership that he insists squandered the Western Hemisphere's largest oil reserves, plunging the vast majority of the population into poverty.

 The latest split comes amid growing discontent with what critics and former allies say is Chavez's tendency to distance himself from political organizations and ignore the democratic balance of power.

 He has come under fire for his friendship with an Argentine writer, Norberto Ceresole, who has denied the existence of the Holocaust and who advocates a "leader-army-masses" troika that rules free of attachments to political parties.

 "He's using a fascist thesis that seeks to wrap the masses around a single person," said Albanis Segura, a 25-year-old university student who showed up at a rally last week to cheer on Arias, Chavez's presidential challenger. "There must be a diversity of ideas," he added.

                  Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.