In the course of his extraordinary career, the grand old man of Venezuelan politics, two-times president Rafael Caldera, who has died aged 93, was no stranger to paradox. He was an anti-communist who legalised the Communist party, a devotee of electoral politics who pardoned guerrillas and coup-plotters, and a professed believer in social justice who found himself defending an International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity plan.
Among his most noteworthy qualities was his amazing longevity. Aged only 20, he helped frame the country's first labour law, and, in 1962, he was instrumental in drawing up a new constitution after the end of the military dictatorship in 1958. First elected president in 1968, he won his second term 25 years later, at the age of 77, on a wave of nostalgia, born of popular disgust over the corruption and incompetence of Venezuela's morally bankrupt political system. It was his sixth presidential campaign in a political career spanning more than five decades, and he would, in due course, become the country's second octogenarian president.
Born into a well-to-do family in the western state of Yaracuy, Caldera was brought up by his aunt, after his mother died when he was two. A conservative Catholic, he first achieved prominence as an anti-communist student leader and founder of the national student union. Graduating in law and political science from the Central University in Caracas in 1939, he embarked on a career that combined academic and political activities. He first stood for the presidency in 1947, but was defeated by Rómulo Gallegos of the social democratic party Democratic Action (AD).
Although he initially welcomed the 1948 military coup against Gallegos, Caldera became an opponent of the military regime. He was arrested several times for political offences and spent much of the dictatorship era in exile. After the 1958 overthrow of the military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Caldera was a leading player in the three-party stability pact known as Punto Fijo. The pact took its name from Caldera's Caracas residence, where it was signed.
By the 1990s, the fact that Caldera, a founder of one of the two main parties and a leading political figure for as long as anyone could remember, should have remained free of the pervasive taint of corruption was an achievement in itself. Equally striking, though, was his 1993 break with the Christian Democratic COPEI party he had co-founded in 1946 – and led for more than 20 years – and the formation of a ragbag, pro-Caldera coalition of 17 parties known as the Convergence movement.
COPEI had denied him its candidacy, and while many saw Caldera as the standard-bearer of political rectitude, others regarded his abandonment of the party as little more than opportunism. If so, it was an opportunism whose crowning moment occurred earlier, on 4 February 1992, when Caldera's virtual justification of an attempted military coup as the inevitable result of anti-popular economic policies turned him into the standard-bearer of the opposition.
Dismissed as "chiripas" (little insects), Caldera's followers in the Convergence movement adopted the term with pride. Their leader scraped a narrow victory with just 30% of the vote (amid 50% abstention), and was obliged – as in his first term in office – to govern with an opposition majority in parliament.
No one denied that the country was in crisis. After bloody price riots in 1989, two coup attempts and the removal of President Carlos Andrés Pérez on corruption charges, the electorate was demanding fundamental change. There could be no democracy, Caldera had warned, if the people were starving; and in office he would issue pardons to some 100 participants in the attempted coups. The essence of his appeal was a return to the pre-oil boom values of his first (1969-74) presidency, a period of stability and social progress in which most of the country's guerrilla movements accepted a government peace programme and the once-combative Communist party regained legal status.
In the 1990s the Caldera approach foundered on harsh economic reality. A financial sector crisis early in his presidency led to the nationalisation of half the country's banks, and by April 1996 he was forced into the arms of the despised IMF – making his government one of the last in the hemisphere to accept the prevailing neo-liberal doctrines.
Although the weary Venezuelan populace did not react with 1989-style riots, the president's popularity went into decline, falling to around 20% from early ratings close to 70%. Caldera's health was also declining, and his public appearances became steadily fewer as his frailty and shaky delivery led to rumours that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Caldera was among the survivors of what was known in Venezuela as the "generation of 1928", a group of public figures who took their name from the 1928 student riots against Juan Vicente Gómez, dictator from 1908 to 1935, whose influence was profoundly felt for half a century. The generation's hallmarks were pragmatism and strategic alliances, principles to which Caldera remained faithful to the end.
When looking for a planning minister who could sell the electorate the 1996 economic reform package, for instance, he settled on an opposition politician, Teodoro Petkoff, one of the leftist guerrilla leaders of the 1960s who had signed peace agreements during Caldera's first term. Despite his undoubted skills, however, it was hard to escape the widespread conclusion that by the end of his career Caldera's longevity had become a liability to his reputation. In short, he had outlived his own political abilities.
In 1999, Caldera handed the presidential sash to Hugo Chávez, who, as an army lieutenant-colonel, had led the February 1992 coup and later received the presidential pardon. Many in the anti-Chávez camp have argued that the pardon paved the way for an authoritarian regime. Caldera, whose opinions were still voiced weekly via a newspaper column, was no supporter of the new president. But he maintained that the move had been necessary to preserve the peace.
He is survived by a wife, Alicia Pietri, three sons and three daughters.
• Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez, lawyer and politician, born 24 January 1916 died 24 December 2009