Venezuela's opposition says the ballot box, not the clutch of cancer, offers the best chance to unseat the president who has mocked its leaders for years.

The rollercoaster drama of President Hugo Chavez's health woes has kept Venezuelans riveted for a month. Instead of jumping on the president's illness like jackals on a wounded lion, most leading opponents of the 56-year-old Venezuelan leader are coolly keeping their sights and energies fixed on a presidential election due next year.

"We have a route and we're going to follow it," Caracas metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma, a strident Chavez critic, told Reuters hours after the president returned unexpectedly from Cuba after having a cancerous tumor removed. Showing notable restraint in a nation where partisan invective has often gone to vicious lengths, opposition leaders have shied away from comments on Chavez's illness that could be construed as capitalizing on his misfortune.

Instead, representatives of all political colors in the notoriously fractious opposition coalition, who have often snarled at each other as well as Chavez, have been conspicuously united in wishing him a speedy recovery.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/05/us-venezuela-chavez-opposition-idUSTRE7644E320110705