Nicolas Maduro has been officially declared as the winner of the Sunday’s Venezuela’s presidential election, but the opposition and key regional neighbours have rejected the outcome.
The opposition coalition claimed a significant victory in an election campaign marked by allegations of political coercion and concerns about fraudulent activities.
This came after pollsters predicted that Maduro would likely lose but was not expected to concede, given his more than a decade in power.
Maduro won re-election with 51.2 percent of votes, while opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia received 44.2 percent, according to the electoral council (CNE), which has majority of its members loyal to the president.
Maduro who is 61, addressed celebrating supporters at the presidential palace minutes after the announcement.
“I can say, before the people of Venezuela and the world, I am Nicolas Maduro Moros, the re-elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. There will be peace, stability, and justice. Peace and respect for the law,” Maduro said.
But the opposition coalition insisted it had garnered 70 percent of the vote, rejecting the figures from the CNE.
“We want to say to all of Venezuela and the world that Venezuela has a new president-elect and it is (candidate) Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia,” opposition leader Maria Corina Machado told journalists, calling the official result “another fraud”.
A 74-year-old former diplomat, Gonzalez Urrutia said, “Our fight continues, and we will not rest until the will of the Venezuelan people is reflected,” while underlining that there was no call for protests.
“The results are undeniable. The country chose a peaceful change,” he wrote on X ahead of the official result.
Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves also denounced the official result as “fraudulent,” while Chile’s president described it as “hard to believe.”
Peru announced it had recalled its ambassador for consultation over the results.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed “serious concerns” that the result did not reflect the will of Venezuelans.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, for his part, called on Caracas to ensure “full transparency in the electoral process.”
Venezuela’s allies, including China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Bolivia, however, congratulated Maduro.
Independent polls had predicted Sunday’s vote would bring an end to 25 years of “Chavismo,” the populist movement founded by Maduro’s socialist predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chavez.
Since 2013, Maduro has been at the helm of the once-wealthy petro-state where GDP dropped by 80 percent in a decade, pushing more than seven million of its 30 million citizens to emigrate.
He is accused of locking up critics and harassing the opposition in a climate of rising authoritarianism.
Gonzalez Urrutia had replaced popular Machado on the ticket after authorities loyal to Maduro excluded her from the race.
Machado, who campaigned far and wide for her proxy, had urged voters on Sunday to keep “vigil” at their polling stations in the “decisive hours” of counting amid widespread fears of fraud.
Maduro had previously warned of a “bloodbath” if he lost.
He counted on a loyal electoral apparatus, military leadership, and state institutions in a system of well-established political patronage.
On Friday, a Venezuelan NGO said Caracas was holding 305 “political prisoners” and had arrested 135 people with links to the opposition campaign since January.
Ballots were cast on machines that printed paper receipts placed into a container. The electronic votes go directly to a centralised CNE database.
The opposition had deployed about 90,000 volunteer election monitors to polling stations nationwide.
Elvis Amoroso, the CNE president, denounced an “aggression against the data transmission system that delayed” the count.
Maduro also referred to a “hacking” of the voting system, as he went to celebrate with supporters. Voter turnout was 59 percent, Amoroso said.
An estimated 17 million Venezuelans in the country were eligible to cast ballots.
Sunday’s election was the product of a mediated deal reached last year between the government and the opposition.
The agreement to hold the vote led the United States to temporarily ease sanctions imposed after Maduro’s 2018 re-election, which was rejected as a sham by dozens of Western and Latin American countries.
However, the sanctions were snapped back after Maduro reneged on agreed conditions.
Washington is keen for a return to stability in Venezuela, which boasts the world’s largest oil reserves but has severely diminished production capacity.
Economic misery in the South American nation has been a major source of migration pressure on the US southern border.
Most Venezuelans live on just a few dollars a month, with the country’s healthcare and education systems in disrepair.
The government blames sanctions, but observers also point the finger at corruption and government inefficiency.
Concerns over the fairness of the vote were earlier stoked when Caracas blocked several international observers from the country at the last minute.
