{{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 was that Chavez put this country with the world’s largest oil reserves on the road to ruin.
Despite the ill feelings, both men sent their supporters home and urged them to refrain from violence.
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.
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.
Chavistas set off fireworks and raced through downtown Caracas blasting horns in jubilation.
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.
In a victory speech, he told a crowd outside the presidential palace that his victory was further proof that Chavez “continues to be invincible.”
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.”
AP
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