Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro won reelection with 51.2 per cent of votes cast Sunday, the electoral council announced, after a campaign tainted by claims of opposition intimidation and fears of fraud.

Elvis Amoroso, president of the CNE electoral body, in its majority loyal to the government, told reporters that 44.2 per cent of votes had gone to opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia who had been leading in polls.

Maduro, 61, won a third six-year term at the helm of the once wealthy petro-state where GDP dropped by 80 per cent in a decade, pushing more than seven million of its 30 million citizens to emigrate.

In office since 2013, he is accused of locking up critics and harassing the opposition in a climate of rising authoritarianism.

Independent polls had suggested Sunday’s vote could bring an end to 25 years of “Chavismo,” the populist movement founded by Maduro’s socialist predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chavez.

Gonzalez Urrutia replaced popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado on the ticket after authorities loyal to Maduro excluded her from the race.

Machado, who campaigned far and wide for her proxy, urged voters late Sunday to keep “vigil” at their polling stations in the “decisive hours” of counting amid widespread fears of fraud.

Maduro counts on a loyal electoral apparatus, military leadership and state institutions in a system of well-established political patronage.

Sunday’s election was the product of a mediated deal reached last year between the government and the opposition.

The agreement led the United States to temporarily ease sanctions imposed after Maduro’s 2018 reelection, which was rejected as a sham by dozens of Western and Latin American countries.

But the sanctions were snapped back after Maduro reneged on the agreed condition