President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela won a landslide victory in Sunday's presidential election, securing 59 per cent of votes after 80 per cent of the vote was counted. Abstention was lower than expected, reaching 43 per cent.
Venezuela's National Election Board (JNE) ordered polling booths to stay open an extra two hours to accommodate crowds of voters and compensate for technical hitches in some areas.
Mr Chavez's nearest rival, Mr Francisco Arias Cardenas, a former ally and coup conspirator, trailed a distant second place, with 38 per cent of votes.
This is the sixth consecutive election victory for Mr Chavez's "peaceful democratic revolution", which has overhauled democratic institutions and paved the way for greater citizen participation in running the country.
Thousands of people took to the streets on Sunday night when first results were announced, many of them wearing the president's trademark red paratrooper beret.
Mr Chavez addressed supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace. "Every day I feel more proud and more committed to you, my brothers and my sisters," he said. "Only together can we recover Venezuela. We're all in the same boat".
Mr Chavez put his post up for grabs as part of a broad plan to re-legitimise the nation's withered democratic institutions, undermined by corruption and poverty. Mr Chavez has pledged to transform the nation into a first-world country by 2011, the bicentennial of Venezuela's independence from Spain.
The nation's wealthy minority bitterly oppose Mr Chavez's plans to redistribute idle land and implement legislation to activate the nation's new constitution, which places "social needs" ahead of the rights of private enterprise.
The defeated opposition candidate, Mr Cardenas, yesterday refused to recognise the election result and criticised Mr Chavez for putting the nation's "way of life and of liberty" at risk.
Mr Chavez responded by saying that he had merely displaced traditional parties who failed to provide solutions to the nation's pressing problems. "They [political parties] ran this country into the ground for 40 years", said Mr Chavez. "Now it's our turn to take the wheel for a while."
Venezuela, the third-biggest oil producer in the world, has squandered its wealth through greed and mismanagement, leaving 80 per cent of people in poverty, fuelling crime and unemployment.
Mr Chavez's "Polo Patriotico", a broad left coalition, won over half the governorships which were up for election, took the newly-created mayoral post in Caracas, along with a majority in the new 165-seat Congress.
However, his coalition fell short of the two-thirds majority required to implement legislation alone.
Mr Chavez takes office in the midst of a deep recession, with a shrinking economy - $8 billion (£6.72 billion) has disappeared in capital flight - a dramatic drop in foreign investment and a dangerous economic reliance on volatile oil prices.