Venezuela’s Ruling Party Claims Win as Opposition Boycotts
By Vanessa Buschschlüter (BBC News)
HAVANA TIMES – Venezuela’s ruling party is celebrating what it has described as “an overwhelming victory” in regional and parliamentary elections, which were boycotted by the majority of opposition parties.
The electoral council (CNE), which is dominated by government loyalists, says candidates for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s (PSUV) – President Nicolas Maduro’s party – won the race for governor in 23 out of the country’s 24 states.
According to the CNE, the ruling coalition also won 82.68% of the votes cast for the National Assembly, Venezuela’s legislative body.
The main opposition parties called the elections a “farce”. Opposition leader, María Corina Machado, said turnout had been below 15%.
“More than 85% of Venezuelans did not obey this regime and said ‘no’,” Machado said about those who abstained.
Independent journalists who visited polling stations throughout the day said that they saw no lines and fewer people turning out than for the presidential election last July.
The CNE meanwhile put the turn-out at 42.6%.
The opposition has long questioned the independence of the CNE, which is led by Elvis Amoroso, a former legal counsel to President Maduro.
The Electoral Council lost credibility last July
The CNE came in for widespread national and international criticism last year when it declared Maduro the winner of the presidential election without ever providing the detailed precinct voting tallies to back up their claim.
Venezuela’s opposition, meanwhile, published voting tallies it had gathered with the help of official election observers which showed that its candidate, Edmundo González, was the overwhelming winner (67 to 30%).
Amid the wave of repression and well over a thousand arrests which followed the presidential election, Gonzalez went into exile to Spain.
Machado, who threw her weight behind presidential hopeful Edmundo González after she was barred from running for public office, remains in hiding in Venezuela.
She was the main advocate for boycotting this Sunday’s legislative and gubernatorial elections, saying that the result of July’s presidential election should be respected before any new elections are held.
“We voted on 28 July. On 25 May, we won’t vote,” she said in a video message shared earlier this month.
However, a handful of opposition politicians did run for office, arguing that leaving the field open to government candidates was a mistake.
Among them were former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales and Juan Requesens, who was jailed by the Maduro government for allegedly taking part in a 2018 drone attack on the president.
Capriles told Spanish daily El País that for him “voting in Venezuela is an expression of resistance, of resilience, of not giving up”.
Their decision to stand in the elections was criticized by those calling for a boycott, with Machado saying they had “betrayed the cause”.
With turnout low, President Maduro’s PSUV party sailed to victory in 23 of the 24 gubernatorial races, up from the 20 governor posts it previously held.
According to the preliminary results of the legislative election, the coalition backing President Maduro won an absolute majority of the 285 seats.
But three politicians from Henrique Capriles’ opposition UNT party were also voted into the National Assembly, including Capriles himself.
Maduro has hailed the result as a “victory of peace and stability” and celebrated the fact that his party had regained control of the states of Zulia and, in particular, Barinas, the home state of his predecessor in office and political mentor, Hugo Chavez.
Only the state of Cojedes will now be in opposition hands, following the re-election of opposition candidate Alberto Galíndez.
Sunday’s vote was preceded by a wave of arrests, which saw more than 70 people with links to the opposition detained for allegedly “planning to sabotage the election”.
Among those detained is Juan Pablo Guanipa, 60, a close ally of Maria Corina Machado. The interior minister accused him of being “one of the leaders of this terrorist network” which he claimed had been plotting to disrupt the election by planting bombs at key sites.
Machado said his arrest and those of dozens of others was “state terrorism, pure and simple”.