Presidential election campaign kicks off in Venezuela
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E-mail Xinhua, April 3, 2013
The electoral campaign in Venezuela, heading for the upcoming presidential elections on April 14, officially started on Tuesday and will run for 10 days, during which the candidates will present their proposals to the entire country.
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Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez's hand-picked successor, has criticized his opponent in Venezuela's upcoming presidential election. [Photo: Agencies] |
The National Electoral Council (CNE) confirmed that the campaign will close on April 11 and called for political organizations to respect the rules of publicity and undertake their activities with respect to the other candidates and the people of Venezuela.
"This campaign will be developed in a delicate emotional context, so we demand all the parties to avoid unnecessary exacerbations and delete expressions that can affect election environment," said the CNE President Tibisay Lucena.
In that regard, she recalled that all parties involved in the electoral campaign should know there is no room for improvisation and excesses. "This process requires extra effort to maintain favorable conditions for the development of the event," she said.
The candidate of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Nicolas Maduro, who is also the acting president after the death of Hugo Chavez, was listed as the favorite in all surveys conducted so far, with a wide margin of nearly 20 percentage points.
According to results released Monday by local pollster company Hinterlaces, Maduro would get 55 percent of the vote against 35 percent for Capriles, who was defeated by Chavez in last year's election.
Maduro started his campaign in the central state of Barinas, the birthplace of the Bolivarian Revolution leader, Hugo Chavez.
The PSUV has explained that the task of the former Foreign Minister is to symbolically replicate the path taken by Chavez last year -- "From Sabaneta de Barinas to Miraflores (the presidential palace)."
For his part, opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the right- wing candidate with the support of the so-called Democratic Unity Roundtable, began his journey in northeastern Monagas state.
The CNE president has appealed to all the public and private media to seek a balance of content and publicize the campaign through authorized means.
Moreover, Lucena said that in use of telephone means during election campaign is only permitted to send a determined number of text messages every day.
"It is prohibited to use other messages besides the SMS message, including calls, or voice memos. Violation of this provision constitutes a serious breach of the rules of campaign and will be subject to sanctions," she said.
The Electoral Act also requires the pollster company to respect the limit for spreading their polls until "a week before polling day," Lucena said, so the polls should not be published after April 7.
Venezuela will hold the presidential election on April 14 to select a successor of Chavez, who died last month after two years' struggle against cancer.
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