{{Nicolas Maduro, won a razor-thin victory in Sunday’s special presidential election in Venezuela but the opposition candidate refused to accept the result and demanded a full recount.}}<\/p>\n
Maduro’s stunningly close victory followed an often ugly, mudslinging campaign in which the winner promised to carry on Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution, while challenger Henrique Capriles’ main message was that Chavez put this country with the world’s largest oil reserves on the road to ruin.<\/p>\n
Despite the ill feelings, both men sent their supporters home and urged them to refrain from violence.<\/p>\n
Maduro, acting president since Chavez’s March 5 death, held a double-digit advantage in opinion polls just two weeks ago, but electoral officials said he got just 50.7% of the votes to 49.1 % for Capriles with nearly all ballots counted.<\/p>\n
The margin was about 234,935 votes. Turnout was 78 percent, down from just over 80% in the October election that Chavez won by a nearly 11-point margin over Capriles.<\/p>\n
Chavistas set off fireworks and raced through downtown Caracas blasting horns in jubilation. <\/p>\n
But analysts called the slim margin a disaster for Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver in the radical wing of Chavismo who is believed to have close ties to Cuba.<\/p>\n
In a victory speech, he told a crowd outside the presidential palace that his victory was further proof that Chavez “continues to be invincible.”<\/p>\n
But in a hint of discontent, National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, who many consider Maduro’s main rival, expressed dismay in a tweet: “The results oblige us to make a profound self-criticism. It’s contradictory that the poor sectors of the population vote for their longtime exploiters.”<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{Nicolas Maduro, won a razor-thin victory in Sunday’s special presidential election in Venezuela but the opposition candidate refused to accept the result and demanded a full recount.}} Maduro’s stunningly close victory followed an often ugly, mudslinging campaign in which the winner promised to carry on Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution, while challenger Henrique Capriles’ main message […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[101],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-7166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-internationl","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7166"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=7166"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=7166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}