CARACAS — Already grappling with street protests led by the right, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela is facing a new threat from an unlikely place: old-school leftists who accuse him of betraying the socialist legacy that carried him to power.
Maduro was tapped by Hugo Chavez as his preferred successor to the presidency and is quick to invoke the late leader’s name, but orthodox socialists are grumbling about liberalized currency reforms they say are counter to the revolution.
The tensions came to a head last week when Maduro fired Planning Minister Jorge Giordani, a Marxist economist whose spartan lifestyle and anti-capitalist doctrine earned him the nickname ‘‘The Monk.’’ Giordani is not going into forced retirement quietly.
In a lengthy tract published on several websites, he has accused Maduro of undoing Chavez’s gains and failing to control his administration, implying corruption and incompetence. It is, he said, ‘‘painful and alarming to see a Presidency that does not convey leadership.’’
This high-profile criticism is on top of public complaints from union representatives and former Chavez advisers who have turned Aporrea, a popular pro-government website for policy discussion, into a forum for increasingly blunt attacks on the presidency.
Charges that Maduro is mishandling Chavez’s legacy have the potential to do real damage. The former bus driver and union leader squeaked out an electoral victory by riding the tide of admiration and mourning that followed Chavez’s death from cancer last year.
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I suppose you can take a scroll through Venezuela to try and find some food.
If Maduro loses support of the ideological left, he will be hard-pressed to continue reforms aimed at extracting the country from a spiral of economic chaos, said Max Cameron, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia.
Maduro is confronting a host of troubles as he moves into his second year in office. Opposition protests have left 43 dead by the official count, Venezuela’s bolivar has lost more than half its value during his term, and essential items such as toilet paper and flour have become impossible to find with any regularity.
In the last year, Venezuela’s central bank has rolled out several new parallel foreign exchange rates, which critics call stealth currency devaluations. The free-floating currency system, intended to curb the black market, allows individuals and companies to participate in daily trading.
On Wednesday, Maduro addressed his detractors directly.
‘‘I am just a son of Chavez trying to complete the task he left me in an honest, humble way, working every day to stay loyal,’’ he said.
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