“By hook or by crook”

VENEZUELA’S president, Nicolás Maduro, admits that a parliamentary election on December 6th “could be the most difficult” test the government has faced since Hugo Chávez, his mentor, came to power following an election in 1998. Mr Maduro, like Chávez, claims to be leading an “anti-imperialist” revolution. Yet his legitimacy derives purely from the ballot box. Chávez’s popularity was boosted by an oil windfall, which he showered on Venezuela’s previously neglected poor. This helped him win a further three elections, by wide margins, before his death from cancer in 2013. Shortly afterwards Mr Maduro won by just 1.5 percentage points a presidential election that the opposition denounced as fraudulent.

Mr Maduro, a former bus driver, lacks not just Chávez’s charisma and political skills but also his luck. The plunge in the oil price, plus years of corrupt mismanagement, have hit Venezuela hard. The government stopped publishing economic statistics months ago. The IMF forecasts that inflation will hit 190% and the economy will shrink by 10% this year (after a decline of 4% last year). Imports have fallen by more than 40% since 2012, reckons Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at Bank of America. Despite big price increases, many goods are in short supply. “People are really sick of having to queue up for everything,” says a long-suffering resident of Caracas.