The socialist autocrat dominates the airwaves and is tapping the state's deep oil coffers to fund his campaign and "buy" votes with a calculated explosion of investment in populist social programme in the weeks before the vote.
But despite its energy riches, the country is mired in debt and unemployment as state-imposed price and exchange rate controls shackle the economy. And violent crime is so endemic that Caracas has the unenviable ranking of the murder capital of the world.
Now, with the long-divided opposition united for the first time behind a charismatic state governor who is already a veteran of Venezuela's rough-and-tumble politics despite his youthful years, President Chavez is facing his most serious competition at the ballot box since he came to power in 1998.
At stake is the grip on power of an anti-Western firebrand who embraces Iran and China and is seeking to use the nation's oil wealth to export his dream of a socialist revolution across Latin America.
It is a "David and Goliath" battle, Mr Capriles told The Sunday Telegraph during a wide-ranging interview in which he pledged a number of radical breaks from the policies of the former paratrooper officer know by his fervent supporters as "El Comandante".
On his first day in office, he said, he would halt the "gifts" of free or heavily-subsidised oil to Mr Chavez's left-wing ideological allies in Cuba and Nicaragua. Nor would there be any more discount deals to sympathetic Western leaders such as Ken Livingstone, a Chavez admirer who as London mayor negotiated cheap oil from Caracas for the capital's buses.....
Chavez was “re-elected.”