Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's approval numbers have benefited from the Obama administration's decision to declare his South American country a threat to U.S. national security, Informe 21 reported based on a local poll.

At 25 percent, popular support for the leader was up slightly, though the improvement fell within the Datanálisis survey's margin of error, Reuters detailed. But "In the last four polls, Maduro's popularity has been practically stable; it is no longer falling," the polling firm's president, Luis Vicente León, told Informe 21.

Toward the end of last year, the approval numbers of the former bus driver and union leader had reached an all-time low of 22.8 percent, the website recalled; by the end of January, however, they had once again increased to 23.3 percent.

President Barack Obama on March 9 issued an executive order saying that the volatile situation in Venezuela represented an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States"; his administration imposed sanctions against seven high-ranking Venezuelan officials, prompting a furious reaction in Caracas, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

"President Barack Obama, in the name of the U.S. imperialist elite, has decided to personally take on the task of defeating my government, intervening in Venezuela, and controlling it from the (United States)," Maduro had charged in response. "Obama today took the most aggressive, unjust and poisonous step that the (United States) has ever taken against Venezuela," the president added.

The U.S. sanctions and Maduro's tough words may have ended up helping the Venezuelan leader's public image, Yahoo News noted.

"Suddenly, the unpopular leader has an excuse to crank up the revolutionary rhetoric and try to fire up supporters, copying a tactic used skillfully for more than a decade by his mentor and predecessor, the late socialist firebrand Hugo Chávez," the news service editorialized.

While his 25 percent approval rating may seem low, Maduro today is actually more popular than many of his South American counterparts, Informe 21 pointed out: Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff and Peruvian leader Ollanta Humala, for example, enjoy less support in their respective countries, the website detailed.