CARACAS, Venezuela An overwhelming re-election win in hand, President Hugo Chavez can now push for more profound changes including scrapping presidential term limits. But his vows to eradicate poverty have raised high expectations.His core constituency is apt to put on the pressure for him to deliver.

Sunday’s crushing victory over challenger Manuel Rosales was the ex-military man’s fourth electoral triumph Chavez, who was swept into office eight years ago by voters angry with a political elite considered corrupt and out of touch.

While critics see Chavez as power-hungry, a majority of Venezuelans have repeatedly shown they believe his socialist revolution offers a better future — even if it remains uncertain what that will mean.

“His re-election tells us he retains a rapport and bond with many Venezuelans, that even those who haven’t directly benefited from the ‘missions’ (oil-funded social programmes) have hope of doing so in the future,” said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “That Chavez controls key institutions in Venezuela and has benefited from an oil bonanza in recent years also helps a lot.”

Chavez has channelled oil profits into multibillion-dollar programmes for the poor including subsidised food, free university education and cash benefits for single mothers. Many supporters cite those programmes as being key help for their families, though they may not significantly raise living standards.

Updated results from Sunday’s vote showed that with 85 percent of polling stations counted, Chavez had 62 percent with 38 percent for Rosales. Chavez was headed for a clean sweep of all 24 states.

The former army paratrooper has compared politics to war.

He staged a skilled comeback from a failed 1992 coup to the presidency; his counterattack against a crippling opposition-led strike gave him control of the state oil company and its revenues to bankroll his social programs; since triumphing over a 2004 recall referendum, his allies have taken control of congress, state offices and the judiciary. And he has extended agrarian reforms while renegotiating tougher contracts with foreign oil companies.

Chavez says he plans to seek constitutional reforms to end presidential term limits, which would enable him to run again in 2012.

“The behaviour of the Chavista movement is that any time there is a triumph there is an immediate change. Exactly what the change is going to be is unclear,” said Steve Ellner, political science professor at Venezuela’s University of the East.

Ellner predicts that among the first orders of business for Chavez may be cracking down on corruption and purging his own movement of dishonest officials.

“There is a small group of people that have become millionaires in this revolutionary process,” Eliecer Otaiza, vice minister of light industries and commerce, said in Congress earlier this year in a rare public admission.

Chavez faces a range of pressing problems in a country where one in three live on less than US$3 a day and violent crime is rampant.

He talks passionately of radical solutions. Claiming victory from a balcony at the presidential palace on Sunday, Chavez hailed his victory as a “point of departure, an embarkment.”

“Today a new phase begins,” he said. “We can define that in many ways ... a deepening, a widening, an expansion of Venezuela’s revolution toward socialism.”

Chavez has hinted at some changes, such as more oil-funded spending on free health care. And he has repeatedly threatened to nationalise Venezuela’s largest telecommunications company.

Such moves appear to have some support:

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll last month found that 63 percent of registered voters believe presidents should be able to hold more than two consecutive terms while 61 percent back nationalising private companies when in the national interest.

Chavez admits his ideology is a work-in-progress, and uncertainty has often contributed to fears among Venezuelans that he is seeking to mimic his mentor Fidel Castro with the establishment of a one-man communist system.

Chavez says he wants a vibrant democracy and notes that it was his opponents, whom he derides as pawns of Washington, that backed a brief coup against him in 2002.

Rosales’ quick concession appeared a break from a past in which the opposition often cried vote fraud.

The US government, which often clashes with Chavez, immediately held out the possibility of greater cooperation.

“We look forward to having the opportunity to work with the Venezuelan government on issues of mutual interest,” State Department press officer Eric Watnik said yesterday.