CARACAS — President Hugo Chavez won re-election yesterday, surviving his closest race yet after a bitter campaign in which the opposition accused him of unfairly using Venezuela’s oil wealth and his near total control of state institutions to his advantage.
A long wait for the results produced high tensions, including a Twitter hashtag called BitingNails that became the most popular in the country. Finally, fireworks exploded over downtown Caracas amid a cacophony of horn-honking by elated Chavez supporters.
With 90 percent of votes counted, Chavez had more than 54 percent of the vote to 45 percent for challenger Henrique Capriles, a 40-year-old former state governor who unified and energized the opposition.
But Capriles’ promises to seriously address violent crime that has spun out of control, streamline a patronage-bloated bureaucracy and end rampant corruption proved inadequate against Chavez’s charisma, well-oiled political machine and a legacy of putting Venezuela’s poor first with generous social welfare programs.
Chavez rallied thousands of supporters from a balcony of the presidential palace, holding up a sword that once belonged to 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar.
“The revolution has triumphed!” Chavez told the crowd, saying his supporters “voted for socialism.”
A Capriles victory would have brought a radical foreign policy shift including a halt to preferential oil deals with allies such as Cuba, along with a loosening of state economic controls and an increase in private investment.
It was Chavez’s third re-election in nearly 14 years in office. It was also his smallest victory margin. In 2006, he won by 27 percentage points.