Nicolas Maduro “wins” presidential elections but the opposition, the US and US-aligned governments in the region refuse to accept results. Eyes are now on Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
On Sunday, Venezuela’s incumbent President Nicolas Maduro won a third term in the presidential elections after obtaining 51.2% of the vote share. That’s according to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE). But did he? That is the question millions of Venezuelans are now asking themselves and each other. According to the CNE, the main opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won 44.2% of the votes cast.
González is a former Venezuelan diplomat who was put out to pasture in 2002 after supporting the failed US-backed coup against Hugo Chavez. He is widely seen as a stand-in for Maria Corina Machado, a US-backed politician who was until recently the opposition front runner before being banned from holding political office after being charged with corruption as well as for her full-throttled support for US intervention.
During her career, Machado has backed US-led sanctions against Venezuela’s economy, the Trump administration’s farcical attempt to impose Juan Guaido as interim president, and has even asked foreign governments, including Israel and Argentina’s, to intervene militarily in Venezuela. It is crystal clear what a González-Machado ticket will mean for Venezuela: a government in thrall to the US and Israel which, like Milei’s in Argentina, will rapidly cool relations with the US’ main strategic rivals, China and Russia, lend its full support to Israel’s Gazacide and may even ask to join NATO.
“Groundhog Day in Venezuela”
Election day itself was surprisingly peaceful, though tensions have been rising since the results were announced.
Maduro’s vote haul was down by more than a million compared with the presidential election of 2018. Following the announcement of Maduro’s triumph, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was among the first to cast aspersions on the results:
“We have serious concerns that the announced result does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people. It is critical that every vote is counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of the votes.”
Whether the US recognises the elections results is ultimately moot. Even before the elections it was among a handful of countries in the world that still failed to recognise the legitimacy of the Maduro government. As Mint Press News reports, the US government has been working overtime to dislodge Maduro’s socialist government, spending tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on “democracy promotion” in the country since Chavez’s electoral triumph in 1998.
Venezuela’s opposition also refused to recognise the results, just as it did in 2015 and 2019. As the Argentine geopolitical analyst Bruno Sgarzini writes, welcome to “groundhog day in Venezuela”.
Before the official results were even announced, Machado had proclaimed Gonzalez as “president-elect.” Venezuela, she said, “has a new president elect and his name is Edmundo González, and everybody knows it.”
She also claimed that the candidate of the Democratic Unitary Platform (or PUD, for its Spanish initials) had won 70% of the votes, and that Maduro had obtained just 30%, adding that PUD had won in all of the nation’s 23 states. This claim was apparently based on the quick counts coming out of just 30% of the voting sites — which invites the question: why did the opposition have access to such a small sample of results?
There were other anomalies to the proceedings. For example, it took the CNE far longer than usual to announce the results and by Tuesday evening there was still no breakdown of results by polling station. The Carter Center, which often sends election observers to Venezuela, has called on the CNE to “immediately publish the presidential election results at the polling station level.” So, too, has Brazil’s Lula government.
Exit polls conducted by US pollster Edison Research giving González a more than 30-point lead over Maduro appears to have played a key role in shaping the post-election narrative. One of the first people to publish this information was Juan Forero of The Wall Street Journal. Venezuelan opposition figures such as Leopoldo López seized on the data and spread it across social media. Given its provenance — a US journalist sharing information from a US pollster — the information was treated as gospel.
“The results are undeniable,” Lopéz declared just minutes before the CNE announced the official results. “The country has chosen the path of peace.”
What Lopéz and other members of the opposition didn’t mention (but Ben Norton does) is that Edison Research is a CIA-linked firm with a long history of providing US state propaganda organs with convenient polling results in geopolitical hotspots such as Ukraine, Georgia and Iraq…
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Nick Corbishley 