CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan electoral officials say voters have narrowly elected Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor as president in a razor-close special election Sunday.
Winner Nicolas Maduro campaigned on a promise to carry on Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution, and defeated a two-time challenger who claimed the late president’s regime has put Venezuela on the road to ruin.
Officials say Maduro defeated Henrique Capriles by only about 300,000 votes. The margin was 50.8 percent to 49.1 percent.
Tensions rose soon after polls closed as both sides hinted at victory and suggested the other was plotting fraud.
Jorge Rodriguez, the head of the campaign for acting President Maduro, said he couldn’t reveal the results before electoral authorities did but strongly suggested Maduro had won by smiling and summoning supporters to the presidential palace, where Chavez’s supporters gathered to celebrate the late president’s past victories. And he warned that Maduro’s camp would not allow the will of the people to be subverted.
Capriles and his campaign aides immediately lashed out at Rodriguez’s comments.
Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, a Capriles campaign coordinator, suggested the government was trying to steal the election. “They are misleading their people and are trying to mislead the people of this country,” he said.
Capriles also suggested fraud was in the works in a Twitter message: “We alert the country and the world of the intent to change the will of the people!”
Maduro, the longtime foreign minister to Chavez, pinned his hopes on the immense loyalty for his boss among millions of poor beneficiaries of government largesse and the powerful state apparatus that Chavez skillfully consolidated. Chavez died from cancer on March 5.
Capriles’ main campaign weapon was to simply emphasize “the incompetence of the state,” as he put it to reporters Saturday night.
Maduro, 50, was favored to win, but his early big lead in opinion polls was cut in half over the past two weeks in a country struggling with the legacy of Chavez’s management of the world’s largest oil reserves. Millions of Venezuelans were lifted out of poverty under Chavez, but many also believe his government not only squandered, but plundered, much of the $1 trillion in oil revenues during his tenure.
“We can’t continue to believe in messiahs,” said Jose Romero, a 48-year-old industrial engineer who voted for Capriles in the central city of Valencia.
Capriles is a 40-year-old state governor who lost to Chavez in October’s presidential election by a nearly 11-point margin.
