Nicolás Maduro, a one-time bus driver who went on to become a confidant of late President Hugo Chávez, won a razor-thin victory in Venezuela’s presidential elections on Sunday, election authorities said.
The narrow margin prompted the opposition to call for a full recount, setting the stage for rising tensions in this deeply divided nation, which holds the world’s largest reserves of oil and is sliding toward economic crisis after 14 years of free-spending rule by the late populist.
Mr. Maduro, handpicked by Mr. Chavez as his successor, took 7.505 million votes, or 50.6%, while opposition candidate Henrique Capriles received 7.27 million ballots, officials said.
«We won a just, legal, constitutional election,» Mr. Maduro said on the balcony of Venezuela’s Miraflores presidential palace, as fireworks boomed overhead and a crowd of redshirted supporters waved flags and cheered. «If I had lost by one vote, I would have accepted my responsibility.»
Mr. Maduro, 50 years old, at first called on the election agency to carry out a recount of just over half the ballots, saying a full recount would lead to weeks of potential political instability. But then within minutes, he shifted gears and said he would accept a full recount.
Mr. Capriles said he wouldn’t recognize the election results «until every vote is recounted.» He said his campaign documented 3,200 election-related incidents that cast doubt on the result.
Mr. Maduro, a tall and mustachioed former foreign minister, will be tested quickly. He inherits a country with the world’s largest oil reserves but with growing financial strains despite almost a decade of high oil prices. Inflation is expected to reach more than 30% this year.
The government’s budget deficit ended last year at roughly 15% of annual economic output—far higher than crisis-hit European nations. And a lack of dollars has led to shortages of everything from milk to corn flour, the staple of the Venezuelan diet.
Making matters worse, rates of violent crime are among the worst in the world, power outages regularly plunge parts of the country into darkness, the state oil industry is suffering from a lack of investment and corruption is widely seen as worsening.
«I don’t know why anyone would want the job because the challenges are so many; all the problems are tightly bound around the mismanagement that took course over the 14 years of Chávez,» said Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, a think tank based in New York, Washington and Miami. «There’s going to be contraction in the economy, and Venezuelans are going to wake up and realize that the party is over.»
Resolving those issues will involve increasingly difficult trade-offs for Mr. Maduro, particularly with a narrow victory that robs him of a broad mandate. Any decline in public spending, for instance, could create a backlash for a young president who lacks Mr. Chávez’s charisma, and a connection with the poor.
Just last week, Mr. Maduro promised that he would raise the monthly minimum wage three times later this year if he won the vote, bringing it up some 45% to as much as $471.
Mr. Maduro said the wage increases would help workers cope with rising costs, but economists say it will only fuel inflation further.
«This is a Pyrrhic victory,» said Orlando Ochoa, an economist at the Andres Bello Catholic University. «Within a year, he’s going to have real trouble.»
Government spending as a percentage of the economy during Mr. Chávez’s tenure nearly doubled to 45% last year—about 20 percentage points higher than the Latin American average, according to Venezuelan economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, head of local consultancy Ecoanalitica.
Fueled by potent mix of high oil prices, borrowing and spending central-bank reserves, Mr. Chávez created social programs such as free health care in the slums. He built a network of supermarkets with subsidized prices and built cut-priced housing for the poor. Gasoline was made virtually free, and government programs handed out low-price refrigerators and flat screen TV sets to slum dwellers.
Last year alone, as Mr. Chávez faced re-election, one measure of money supply in the economy rose 61%, Mr. Ochoa said.
While memories of the party are still fresh for the majority of Venezuelans, the hangover is starting to kick in. Some 52% of voters think the country is doing badly at the moment, while 44.2% think things are going well, according to a survey by local pollster Datanalisis. As the economy continues to slow in the months to come, dissatisfaction is likely to rise.
Government spending is such a big part of the economy now that a slight decrease could cause growth to virtually stop. Tamara Herrera, an economist with consultancy Síntesis Financiera, said she expected the economy to slide into recession this year.
Mr. Chávez will be a hard act to follow. Critics say Mr. Maduro’s chief quality in his rise through politics was his abiding loyalty to his boss. The pair was close since 1992, when Mr. Maduro was among the activists and supporters who worked to secure Mr. Chávez’s release from prison, where he had landed after leading a failed military coup. When Mr. Chávez reached the presidency in 1999, Mr. Maduro followed him into government, rising to foreign minister and finally vice president last year.
In December, Mr. Chávez, his health failing, endorsed his longtime ally as Venezuela’s next president. After Mr. Chávez died in early March, Venezuelan law called for a new vote within a month.
Mr. Maduro successfully turned the short campaign into a referendum on Mr. Chavez. The candidate called himself Mr. Chávez’s political «son,» relied on the image and recorded voice of the leftist firebrand and used his name more than 7,200 times, an average of 189 times daily during public appearances, according to MaduroDice.com—Spanish for «Maduro Says»—a website that has been counting the references.
Mr. Maduro channeled the tough talk of his mentor, who embraced a role as one of region’s harshest critics of the U.S. Mr. Maduro, who detractors say survived the frequent turnover in Mr. Chávez’s cabinet by staying in the background, also delivered emotional speeches as he assumed the spotlight, at times shedding tears and portraying Mr. Chávez as a saint-like figure.
Mr. Maduro has vowed to deepen Mr. Chávez’s revolution. But some economists say that, despite the tough talk, issues like high inflation and shortages could force Mr. Maduro on to a more orthodox path, including expanding a recent system to auction dollars for companies—a move that would loosen currency controls. Others say any such move might cause tensions within the ruling party.
«I see him being a bit more pragmatic,» said Mr. Oliveros, the economist. «They have room to maneuver; what limits them is their ideology.»
Mr. Maduro relied on a formidable political patronage machine built by his mentor and predecessor. Some 8.1 million Venezuelans over the age of 18—some 43% of the total adult population—receive some kind of direct benefit from one of Mr. Chavez’s «mission» social-spending programs, according to Venezuelan market research company Datos. Plus, there are some 3.2 million Venezuelans on the public payroll—some 17% of the total adult population, according to Datos.
Swelling the number of people who get handouts and the number of government workers has created legions of pro-Chávez voters. At state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the payroll rose from 32,000 employees when Mr. Chávez took over in 1999 to more than 100,000 today, according to government figures.
The opposition said the election process was unfair, pointing to an election agency stacked with pro-Chávez officials. The government dominates television and radio airwaves. While the opposition was allowed only a few minutes of election ads per day, the government runs hour after hour of propaganda, according to a Venezuelan election watchdog, Monitoreo Ciudadano.
Mr. Chávez grew increasingly autocratic while in power, gaining control over most independent institutions ranging from the election agency to the courts to the central bank. He drove dozens of broadcasters off the air. Mr. Chávez didn’t shy from delivering ideologically loaded rants against the opposition, calling them traitors and puppets of the U.S. government, contributing to a deeply fractious political arena that has seen national legislators exchange blows on the parliament floor.
«Chávez was clearly a transformational figure in Venezuela history, for the first time he redirected the state to help poor people though at the same time he moved toward an authoritative direction,» said Robert Pastor, a former U.S. national security adviser on Latin America during the Carter administration.
—Sara Schaeffer Muñoz and José de Córdoba in Caracas contributed to this article.
Fuente: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324345804578422352792472978.html?mod=itp
