Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who died yesterday, once had a popular following in the Middle East. 

In an opinion poll conducted in 2009, Arabs were asked which leaders they most admired outside their own countries. Chavez was named by 36% – placing him top, and a clear 18 points ahead of his nearest rivals.

As al-Arabiya notes today, he "enjoyed popular support for his often critical stances against Israel and the American policy in the region".

In January 2009, Chavez strongly denounced Israel's military offensive in Gaza, expelling the Israeli ambassador and some of the embassy staff.

At a meeting in Qatar in March 2009, he also proposed setting up an oil-backed currency to challenge the US dollar. "A new world is being born," he said told Arab leaders. "Empires fall. There is a world crisis of capitalism, it's shaking the planet."

These moves probably explain his popularity in the poll which was published the following May.

Meanwhile, though, Venezuela had been developing close relations with Iran, forming what Chavez described as an "axis of unity". In 2007, for example, both countries announced a joint fund of $2 billion to invest in countries "attempting to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke". Chavez also received Iran's highest honour – the Islamic Republic Medal – for supporting "Iran's stance on the international scene".

Almost inevitably, this led to Chavez backing the regime when protests broke out following the suspect presidential election in June 2009. Some of the demonstrators' chants attacked Chavez as an "enemy of the people of Iran".

Chavez later supported other corrupt regimes – in Libya and Syria – when they too faced popular uprisings. This, of course, conflicted with the "man of the people" image that Chavez cultivated at home, but Chavez saw it as a way of resisting imperialism.

Assessing Chavez's Middle East policy, Juan Cole describes it as "contradictory and hypocritical". He writes:

"Iran is a right wing theocracy, not a left wing socialist state. If Chavez could embrace a repressive theocracy run for the benefit of wealthy oligarchs, merely because it is anti-American, then of what logical acrobatics was he incapable? ...

"Unable to perform a basic political-economy analysis that would demonstrate that Iran, Libya and Syria had abandoned whatever socialist commitments they once had (Iran of the ayatollahs had never been progressive), Chavez in his own mind appears to have thought that they were analogous to the Bolivia of Eva Morales or the Ecuador of Rafael Correa. Emphatically not so.

"He also imagined these countries as anti-American (only Iran really is), and appears to have believed that such a stance covers a multitude of sins on the part of their elites – looting the country, feathering their own nests, and authoritarian dictatorship and police states that deploy arbitrary arrest and torture."

Cole acknowledges that Chavez genuinely improved the lot of the Venezuelan working class and was popular in his own country ...

"But Chavez did sully his legacy as a progressive with his superficial reading of what 'anti-imperialism' entails and his inability to see the neo-liberal police states of the Middle East for what they had become."