WHEN Hugo Chávez announced in December that his cancer had returned, he put to rest all doubts about whom he wanted to succeed him as Venezuela’s president. “My firm, full, absolute and total opinion,” he said, “is that…you should elect Nicolás Maduro.”


Mr Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, was Chávez’s longtime foreign minister, and was appointed vice-president in October. He was sworn in as interim president just hours after Chávez’s state funeral, which was attended by world leaders, including Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, as well as the actor Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson, an American civil-rights activist. Also present was the crown prince of Spain, whose father once asked Chávez at a summit why he would not shut up.

But no sooner had Chávez been laid to rest than Mr Maduro plunged into a bruising political campaign. The constitution requires a new election to be held within 30 days of the president’s death. The vote has been scheduled for April 14th, ten days after the formal deadline. It will pit the incumbent against Henrique Capriles, an energetic state governor whom Chávez defeated last October.
Mr Maduro was mainly seen as a yes man during Chávez’s presidency, and cannot hope to match his predecessor’s charisma. But he is doing everything he can to appropriate his mentor’s popularity. Beneath giant posters of the late president at his inaugural rally, he called himself chavista and a “son of Chávez”. Maintaining his predecessor’s taste for conspiracy theories, he is setting up a formal inquiry into claims that Chávez’s cancer was caused from poisoning by “dark forces” abroad. To ensure that Venezuelans do not lose sight of their former “commander”, Chávez’s body will be embalmed and his remains displayed in a glass case, just as Lenin, Stalin and Mao were. The most committed chavistas want the corpse to be transferred to Venezuela’s Pantheon, the resting place of Simón Bolívar, South America’s independence hero and Chávez’s idol.

Although polls in 2012 showed Mr Capriles beating any chavista  save Chávez himself—who won by 11 percentage points—Mr Maduro’s political stock rose quickly once he was named heir apparent. A poll taken last month by Datanálisis, a consultancy in Caracas, gave him a 12-point lead over Mr Capriles, whose supporters have been discouraged by the opposition’s defeats in the presidential race and in state elections in December.

The short campaign period should favour Mr Maduro, by giving the underdog little time to close the gap and ensuring that Chávez’s body is still somewhat warm on election day. And as the interim president, Mr Maduro will also benefit from the huge advantage of incumbency in the chavista system: he can use public funds and state media on his campaign’s behalf.

Faced with such odds, Mr Capriles has come out swinging. He has accused Mr Maduro, whom he wants to paint as an incompetent exploiting Chávez’s death, of having lied about his boss’s illness. In response, Mr Maduro called him a “fascist”—one of Chávez’s favourite insults. Win or lose, Chávez could hardly have picked a successor who would follow in his footsteps more faithfully.