Maduro wins Venezuela election

Nicolas Maduro was elected Venezuela's president today after pledging to deepen 14 years of the late Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution that cut poverty by half.

The 50-year-old former bus driver received 50.7 percent of the votes, the national electoral council said after about 99 percent of ballots were counted.

Henrique Capriles Radonski, who temporarily stepped down as governor of Miranda state to run for president, had 49.1 percent.

"We had a fair and constitutional victory," Mr Maduro said after the results were announced. "This is another victory, an homage to our Comandante Hugo Chavez."

As a candidate, Mr Maduro benefited from a wave of sympathy for Mr Chavez's March 5th death; as president, he faces accelerating inflation, shortages of consumer goods and slowing growth.

Investors will be looking to see if he adopts policies that are more friendly to businesses, after he resorted to anti- capitalist rhetoric during the campaign to galvanize Chavez's followers, said Alberto Ramos, senior economist at Goldman Sachs and Co in New York.

Venezuelan bonds, last month's worst-performing Latin American securities, erased losses as polls showed Mr Maduro would win the elections, reducing the likelihood of a power struggle that could hurt investors.

Mr Maduro has vowed to follow the steps of his mentor Mr Chavez, who increased state control over the economy by nationalizing more than 1,000 companies or their assets and introduced currency and price controls.

Mr Chavez also tapped the world's biggest oil reserves to help cut poverty to 21.2 percent of the population in the second half of 2012 from 42.8 per cent when he first took power in 1999, according to government data.

"I voted for Maduro because my comandante Chavez ordered it," said Jose Sanchez, a 57-year-old civil engineer. "Chavez prepared him for six years." Maduro called the election a choice between capitalism and socialism.

As Mr Chavez languished in a hospital bed in Cuba before his death, Maduro oversaw a devaluation of the bolivar and expelled two US ambassy oficials who where accused of plotting against the government.

The US denied the charges. Mr Maduro faces mounting economic challenges including dollar shortages and falling oil production that could rapidly undermine the former union leader's support, Kathryn Rooney Vera, a strategist for Bulltick Capital Markets, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

Bloomberg