Nicolás Maduro Moros.

A lifetime politician, Nicolás Maduro earned a reputation as an effective manager and organizer while serving as a union leader during his time spent driving buses in Caracas for a living. His formal career in government began in 1998, when he was elected to the Venezuelan Chamber of Deputies. Maduro has been a prominent figure in Venezuelan national politics since 2005, when he served as speaker of the National Assembly. A longtime confidant of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Maduro was an active member and supporter of Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement, from its founding in 1997 until its dissolution in 2007. That year, Maduro supported the party’s union with a coalition of over twenty other parties in the formation of Chávez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Over the course of Chávez’s fourteen-year tenure as Venezuela’s president, Maduro served as his minister of foreign affairs and vice president. As reports of Chávez’s declining health began to circulate in late 2012, political analysts speculated that Maduro was in line to inherit control over Chávez’s popular but controversial socialist government. Following Chávez’s death in March 2013, Maduro was elected president. However, the circumstances of his election were controversial. Opposition party members and their supporters claimed that Maduro stepped into the vacuum of Chávez’s deep-rooted political legacy, leveraging his influence within the government to ensure the election results swung in his favor. Tension between Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition party continued during his presidency, resulting in episodes of street demonstrations and political violence in early 2014. Despite being sworn in for a second term in January 2019, a number of countries and international organizations condemned the election as illegitimate and did not recognize him as president. Similarly, Maduro claimed victory in the contested 2024 presidential election but refused to release official results and cracked down on opposition protests, prompting the US and other observers to refuse to recognize his government as legitimate.