Sunday, March 10, 2013

Venezuela opposition leader joins presidential race

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles said on Sunday he will challenge the late Hugo Chavez's preferred successor for the presidency next month, setting the stage for a bitter campaign.

Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor, will face election favorite and acting President Nicolas Maduro.

The pair have until Monday to register their candidacies for the April 14 vote. The election will decide whether Chavez's self-styled socialist and nationalist revolution will live on in the country with the world's largest proven oil reserves. "I am going to fight," Capriles said at a news conference. "Nicolas, I am not going to give you a free pass. You will have to beat me with votes."

Former vice president Maduro, 50, a hulking one-time bus driver and union leader turned politician who echoes Chavez's anti-imperialist rhetoric, is expected to win the election comfortably, according to two recent polls. Maduro pushed for a snap election to cash in on a wave of empathy triggered by Chavez's death last Tuesday at age 58 after a two-year battle with cancer.

He was sworn in as acting president on Friday to the fury of Capriles. "You have used the body of the president for political campaigning," Capriles said of Maduro. Capriles, the centrist Miranda state governor who often wears a baseball cap and tennis shoes, lost to Chavez in October. But he won 44 percent of the vote - the strongest showing by the opposition against Chavez.

Capriles has accused the government and Supreme Court of fraud for letting Maduro campaign without stepping down. Although the ruling Socialist Party is favored to win, opposition supporters are trying to raise their spirits. "There's no reason to think that the opposition is condemned to defeat," Teodoro Petkoff, an anti-government newspaper editor, said on his Sunday talk show.

Maduro has vowed to carry on where Chavez left off and ratify his policy platform. He acknowledged he has big shoes to fill. "I am not Chavez - speaking strictly in terms of the intelligence, charisma, historical force, leadership capacity and spiritual grandeur of our comandante," he told a crowd on Saturday. Chavez was immensely popular among Venezuela's poor for funneling vast oil wealth into social programs and handouts.