Venezuela's Maduro invokes ghost of Hugo Chavez in reelection bid

As he launches his bid for a third term in power, Venezuela's unpopular President Nicolas Maduro is again channeling the legacy of his firebrand predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez -- and risking comparisons in the process, analysts say.

More than 10 years after Chavez, a charismatic pillar of Latin America's left, died of cancer, Maduro -- who has stifled dissent as Venezuela's economy has crumbled under his leadership -- has taken steps to build his own iconography.

But with July 28 elections looming, he is again invoking Chavez's magic touch.

"A leader always wants to have or build his own relationship with the masses... but Maduro has a problem: the natural comparison between him and Chavez," Luis Vicente Leon, president of the opinion firm Datanalisis, told AFP.

Chavez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, was a former military man with a surfeit of charm and a fiery-yet-folksy manner that attracted broad popularity, underpinned by generous public spending backed by sky-high oil revenues.

He steered Venezuela into what he called a socialist "Bolivarian revolution" -- himself trying to cash in on the popularity of Simon Bolivar, the country's independence hero.

Maduro, handpicked by Chavez to be his successor, comes up short.

One more card to play

Like his predecessor, he often gives hours-long speeches and lambasts the United States for its "imperial arrogance." But the diatribes have been unleavened by the easy manner shown by Chavez.

And Venezuela's oil-export dependent economy has crumbled over Maduro's 11 years in power, with runaway inflation and critical shortages, as an oil boom went bust partly due to a plunge in global crude prices.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled as a result.

Maduro has consolidated power, cracked down on dissent and invoked his past as a bus driver and union leader to cast himself as a "worker president."

Though much Chavez iconography remains in the country's streets, such as a famous logo of his eyes, the images have largely faded from government offices.

State television still broadcasts old Chavez speeches, but they also show Super-Bigote (Super Moustache), a cartoon in Maduro's image through which he seeks to endear himself to a long-suffering population.

It has not been enough, with polls showing that in a fair election, Maduro would lose to opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, disqualified from the race by courts aligned with the president.

Chavez's popularity, however, has endured -- last year, a decade after his death at age 58, his approval rating stood at close to 50 percent.

"We are all Chavez!" the president said Saturday as he accepted the nomination of his party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Party stalwart Diosdado Cabello, handing the 61-year-old Maduro a party flag that he claimed was made by Chavez's "own hands," said: "I know that in his hands the revolution will not be lost."

And the state TV broadcast of the announcement showed two of Chavez's daughters, Maria Gabriela and Rosines, in tears.

Leon, the Datanalisis head, likened Chavez's popularity to that of other icons who died young -- such as "Marilyn Monroe or James Dean" -- while Maduro assumes the cost of Venezuela's economic crisis and sanctions against it by the United States.

"In his first years, Maduro was not himself, but Chavez," said political scientist Luis Salamanca.

"There is now a return to Chavez. It is one more card he has to play."