ON JULY 28, the 70th birthday of Hugo Chavez (1954-2013), Nicolas Maduro Moros won the Venezuelan presidential election, the fifth since the Bolivarian constitution was ratified in 1999.

In January 2025, Maduro will start his third six-year term as president. He took over the reins of the Bolivarian revolution after the death of Chavez from pelvic cancer in 2013.

Since the death of Chavez, Maduro has faced several challenges: to build his own legitimacy as president in the place of a charismatic man who came to define the Bolivarian revolution; to tackle the collapse of oil prices in mid-2014, which negatively affected Venezuela’s state revenues (over 90 per cent of which were from oil exports); and to manage a response to the unilateral, illegal sanctions deepened on Venezuela by the United States as oil prices declined.