In the early morning hours of Monday (Israel time) it was announced that Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, is the winner of the turbulent presidential election in the country. This despite the tremendous momentum gained by the opposition movement, which was convinced that this year it would succeed in ousting Maduro’s party, which has a socialist orientation.
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The elections were accompanied by many irregularities, and citizens angrily protested the government’s actions in the voting centers even when the results were announced. According to the local electoral authority, with 80% of polling stations counted, Maduro won 51.2% of the vote, while the main opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, obtained 44.2%.
Nicolas Maduro (Photo: Reuters)
Maria Corina Machado, the country’s most popular opposition leader, immediately cast doubt on the results. She declared to journalists in the capital city of Caracas: “We won and the whole world knows it.” Machado called the declared result “impossible” in light of the information her team gathered about the voter turnout.
US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, expressed “grave concerns that the announced result does not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people or their vote.” On the other hand, Maduro denied accusations of electoral fraud, and called his victory “a victory of peace, stability and the idea of equality” in a solemn televised speech. The fear is that Maduro’s declaration of victory could plunge the oil-rich and crisis-ridden country into a period of deep uncertainty, with fears of street protests that could be met with violent repression by security forces loyal to Maduro.
Edmundo Gonzalez (Photo: Reuters)
During the 25 years that Maduro’s party has been in power, the country has experienced an unprecedented economic contraction not seen outside of war zones, and has become the source of one of the world’s largest migration crises. Millions of Venezuelans rallied behind the opposition candidate, Gonzalez, a former diplomat who became a candidate after Machado was disqualified from running by Maduro’s government. Maduro’s political strategy of coercion, suppression and voter confusion, combined with the opposition’s limited ability to monitor the vote, seems to have tipped the scales in his favor. Election officials refused to hand over the printed vote count to observers appointed at several polling stations across the country, preventing the possibility of officially verifying the winning result of the ruling party.
Washington has been carefully watching what is happening in Venezuela, the US has invested heavily in its attempts to oust Maduro from power, including the imposition of harsh sanctions in 2019 that have stifled the already weak Venezuelan economy. Regime change has become even more important to the United States in light of the large wave of Venezuelan immigration to North America, and the growing importance of Venezuelan oil in the changing geopolitical landscape.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Maduro’s government went to great lengths to tilt the results in its favor, including arresting members of the Machado-González campaign and preventing most citizens living abroad from voting. On election day itself, various problems were noted across the country, including the late opening of polling stations, malfunctions in voting machines, and the prevention of entry of official observers to certain voting stations.
