He served as a lawmaker, foreign minister and vice president before being chosen by Chavez as his successor three months before the socialist firebrand died of cancer in 2013.
The choice of Maduro, who lacks Chavez’s rhetorical skills, raised eyebrows in the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
He barely scraped through on his first election in 2013.
But he has fended off crisis after crisis with the help of the military and paramilitaries, even as the economy imploded under the weight of falling oil prices, US sanctions and hyperinflation.
Seven million Venezuelans — a quarter of the population — have voted with their feet and sought a better life abroad since he took office.
Baseball and salsa
Born in Caracas, Maduro is both a professed Marxist and Christian, and as a teenager played guitar in a rock band.
He is a baseball fan and dances salsa — frequently showing off moves on state TV — with his wife Cilia Flores, a former prosecutor he refers to as “First Combatant.”
He has cast himself as a “worker president,” and it has been claimed he deliberately misspeaks in English so as not to be seen as high-brow.
As president, Maduro has weathered many threats imagined and real — including a failed explosive-laden drone attack in 2018 that wounded several soldiers.
He survived US sanctions imposed over his 2018 re-election, which was also tainted by fraud allegations.
About 50 countries including the US recognized congress speaker Juan Guaido as interim president but his parallel government later collapsed.
Maduro has been aided by close political and economic ties with China and Russia, which have helped the country stay barely afloat.
To deflect blame for Venezuela’s woes, he has sustained Chavez’s anti-American conspiracy theories, accusing the US of plotting to kill him and Western nations of ruining the once-thriving economy.