Nicolás Maduro replaced the most charismatic Latin American politician of the 21st century. During his government the worst economic crisis in the recent history of Venezuela was created. And despite everything, it survives.
With his main rivals outside the political board, disqualified or imprisoned, and with a part of the opposition calling for abstention because he did not trust the process, Maduro was re-elected on Sunday as president of Venezuela after the five intense years of the first term.
The support of Chavismo's hard core, which has been in power for almost 20 years, was finally enough for the triumph despite the discontent and protests it has faced.
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"How they have underestimated me," he exclaimed this Sunday in the celebration speech, expressing a sensation shared by analysts and even by some of his critics.
The president says he wants to start a new stage on Monday. It may be that of the consolidation of madurism, which takes shape as the "son of Chávez", as he defines himself, separates himself from his political father.
The triumph of Sunday, despite the low participation and the absence of much of the opposition, is the political zenith of a bus driver and trade unionist who, in parallel with the economic collapse of Venezuela and the political and social conflict has shown astuteness for its survival as leader of the so-called Bolivarian revolution.
BBC Mundo tried through the Minister of Communication, Jorge Rodríguez, to have the vision and opinion of Maduro and other members of the ruling party for this article, but did not receive a response.
How did Maduro get here?
We reconstruct the political trajectory of the controversial president from a key date: December 8, 2012.
The chosen one
That day, the world saw for the last time Chávez, who came and went from Havana to Caracas to treat himself as a cancer.
After months of uncertainty and absences, Chávez named his successor on television.
"If something happened to disqualify me in any way, Nicolás Maduro not only in that situation must conclude as the Constitution mandates the period, but my firm opinion, full as the full moon, irrevocable, absolute, total, is that in this scenario that would require to call presidential elections you choose Nicolás Maduro as president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. "
The then Vice President Maduro, sitting to his left, showed a gesture between fear and worry. Chávez chose him. And he did it because the leader would no longer be president. In March 2013 it was Maduro who announced the death of the commander.
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Chávez praised Maduro, whom he met while in Yare prison, where he served two years in prison after the failed coup of February 4, 1992.
During his visits to the prison, the current president also met with Cilia Flores, who acted as one of the commander's lawyers. Now he is his wife, the "first fighter", a silent figure to whom many attribute great influence in the government.
"He is a full-fledged revolutionary, with great experience despite his youth, great dedication to work, great ability to lead groups," said Chavez on December 8, 2012, who also praised the "gift of people" of his successor.
He was a man of confidence who had been President of Parliament, Chancellor and Vice President.
"A particularly effective political operator," says a former government official who worked closely with Maduro and who asks to speak on condition of anonymity.
Some surprised the appointment of Maduro as his successor ahead of the military Diosdado Cabello - sitting to the right of Chávez in the last television address - and the powerful president of the state PDVSA Rafael Ramírez.
Not for those who saw the progressive rise of Maduro and his constant trips to Havana to meet with the convalescent Chá
"Maduro spent more time in Cuba than any other Chavismo leader, he had direct and permanent access," says the former official, who knows the ins and outs of that key moment.
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Chavez saw in him the civilian who should continue the Bolivarian revolution. A pragmatic man, not a radical. With the ability to negotiate and meet both in a political rally on the street with casual clothes and in offices dressed in suits and ties.
Those who know him closely also define him as a nice, good-natured person with an easy personality.
"He tends to underestimate himself because he did not study or have an intellectual journey, he tends to think he's a brute," says the former official.
His opposition rivals call him "Maburro", something that the president himself feeds.
He uses the contempt of some as a weapon to present himself as the president "of the people", away from the economic and social elites.
"He has a practical intelligence, he had the capacity to absorb information and decide," the source recalls.
The chancellor
Unlike Cabello, Maduro was in 2012 a less polarizing figure. And Chávez had the best credentials of him after appointing him head of foreign policy in 2006 despite not being diplomatic or speaking languages.
"He was the great chancellor of Chavez," says the former official. In those years, Chávez and Maduro formed a successful working couple for the interests of their government.
With the charisma of the commander and the oil money, Venezuela expanded its area of influence and confronted the United States directly, helped by a left turn in the subcontinent.
Venezuelan foreign policy expands then. New members are added to the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). The Unasur (Union of South American Nations) and the Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) are inclined to the side of Venezuela, which becomes part of the Mercosur (Common Market of the South).
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Unlike what happens now, the vast majority of OAS countries (Organization of American States) also backed Venezuela.
At the 2009 OAS General Assembly in Honduras, the 1962 decision to exclude Cuba from the inter-American system was revoked, which meant a harsh and unusual defeat for the United States.
Chavez was the strategist; oil was the facilitator; and Maduro, the operator.
President
Maduro gave the news of the death of the commander on March 5, 2013. He led the funeral and the days of mourning. And with hardly any time, he embarked on the campaign for the April election, in which he won by a narrow margin to Henrique Capriles.
Many sang fraud, but Maduro settled in the Miraflores palace.
His task was Herculean: not only to try to replace Chávez's charisma and devotion, but to confront a very different economic panorama and that the commander himself had already glimpsed.
In the interior of the Chávez government, macroeconomic proposals began to be considered at a time when oil prices were beginning to decelerate.
When the commander died, the task of applying reforms, such as the exchange system, a problem still in effect today, was eventually in the hands of Maduro.
But the former foreign minister, with a leadership much weaker than Chavez and at the center of several factions, was not the reformer who promises to be after winning re-election on Sunday.
In 2014 came the collapse of oil prices, triggering the current economic crisis.
"And the government's decision was to do nothing, there was no reaction to a violent shock, no macroeconomic decision was made," the former official criticizes.
During his tenure, Maduro left important management tasks to the high command of the Army, which he entrusted the importation of food and basic products and even the direction of the oil company PDVSA, almost the only source of income of the country and whose production is in its worst level in the last 30 years, according to data from OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries).
The influence of the uniformed did not avoid, however, some discontent in the barracks, conspiracies, saber rattling and arrests.
War"
But not only the economic began to twist, but also the political. After the triumph of chavismo in the municipal ones at the end of 2013, it was expected that 2014 was finally the year to see the management of Maduro.
Radical opposition leaders commanded by Leopoldo López, perhaps Maduro's biggest antagonist by character, formation, ideology and even physical appearance, wanted to prove his strength as president.
They called for protests in the streets that for some months left some 40 dead and that led to Lopez's disputed imprisonment for alleged glorification of the violence. The politician is now serving a sentence under house arrest.
"That broke the Maduro's quinquennium," says the former official, who says that from there, polarization once again became the epicenter of the debate.
"From then on he has made the conflict a reason for being, he has had such an obtuse opposition that he has helped to polarize the scenario", says the source about the president's relationship with his rivals, very similar also to that of the times of Chávez.
The defeat
In 2015, Chavismo suffered the hardest blow in almost 20 years with the severe defeat in the parliamentary elections that led to the subsequent annulment in Parliament's practice.
Part of the opposition saw it as the signal of the imminent fall of Maduro. He was wrong.
The Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) issued in March 2017 two sentences that robbed the Legislative of powers.
They were the trigger for four months of street protests that left some 120 dead and that, unlike 2014, had not only a political component, but also an economic one due to the acute crisis of inflation and shortages.
The opposition denounced the harsh police repression, while the government accused terrorism to destabilize the government and promote a coup d'état.
Maduro justified both the crisis and the protests with the "war" imposed from the outside by the United States and the "oligarchy", a discourse that fell among his supporters.
And the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House and his policy of sanctions and belligerence served to reinforce the idea of external aggression and to dust off the classic enemy of "imperialism."
The installation of the National Constituent Assembly, completely official, marked the end of the protests. In this favorable climate, the National Electoral Council (CNE), which had halted the recall to Maduro in 2016, scheduled the regional elections, which were postponed.
The opposition denounced fraud after the comfortable triumph Chavez and no longer attended the municipal of December 2017.
A large part of that opposition also did not consider the Sunday elections fair and called for no vote.
The survivor
Maduro has not only faced the usual rivals. Former Minister of the Interior Miguel Rodríguez Torres, ex-prosecutor Luisa Ortega and former oil czar Rafael Ramírez were the heavyweights of Chavismo who turned their backs on him.
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The first is arrested and the other two make their complaints from exile, both persecuted for alleged corruption offenses that surfaced only after their dissidence.
"Maduro is skilled in the maneuver to divide the opposition, to survive, to be a presidential candidate," says the former official, who believes that the president's tight control has avoided further public internal differences.
"The cost of breaking ranks is very high," he adds.
"And he's probably going to win on Sunday, that's very clever," he said of the president before Sunday's vote.
The opposition calls him authoritarian and even "dictator". Maduro retorts boasting of Venezuelan democracy and even jokes with his physical resemblance to Josef Stalin.
"What he has done since he took office is to take all those who oppose him out of his way," says US analyst David Smilde, a sociology professor who has lived or worked in Venezuela since 1992.
The reformer?
Nothing has stopped Maduro for the moment.
"He has faced a number of situations for which any other leader would have resigned," says Smilde, who highlights Maduro's Marxist training in Cuba and his loyalty to the revolutionary slogan of "one step back, two steps forward."
The president, 55, is willing to continue.
"He has got in his head that Chavez left the revolution and he has to follow the revolution to death," adds Smilde, responsible for a blog on politics in Venezuela at the US think tank WOLA (The Washington Office on Latin America).
"Delivering the revolution would be like delivering Chavez," he says of the responsibility that the commander placed on the burly Maduro.
Once the internal dissidence and the opposition were ruled out, Maduro now has six more years of mandate.
"We are going to make all the economic changes that Venezuela needs," he promised on Tuesday at a rally in Charallave, one hour from Caracas, without explaining why he did not do so in the previous five years.
"I'm not that newbie anymore, now I'm a real mature president," he shouted in his powerful voice, comparing himself to the 2013 campaign.
Now he does not use Chavez as much, although his silhouettes share posters with the legend "Together Everything is Possible". In the acts he has been able to see with a quirky shirt in which appears the face of the commander.
But Maduro is already plotting his own path. He launched his own party, Somos Venezuela, as Chávez did with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007.
"It's a new phase, just as revolutionary or suddenly more," Smilde elucubra on the so-called madurismo.
"I think that now we are really going to meet the real Maduro, so we have to give him another chance," Mirla González, a supporter, told me at the campaign event in Charallave.
Now another difficult mandate awaits him.
In addition to keeping the opposition at bay and avoiding new dissidence, it will have to face the economic crisis and surely new sanctions from the United States, the European Union and even from the neighboring countries grouped in the so-called Lima Group.
At a time also in which the US oil company Conoco Phillips seeks to seize assets of the state PDVSA to pay off its debt, a path that other creditors could follow.
"He knows how to win battles," Smilde admits to President Maduro. Now, already re-elected, it is very possible that he will face many more.
- This article was originally published on May 18 and updated after the victory of Maduro in the elections on Sunday, May 20