Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro claimed an unlikely victory, securing a third six-year term, in the country’s presidential election at the weekend, says the Wall Street Journal.
Opposition leaders say the regime had likely falsified the vote count.
The government-controlled National Electoral Council said that the 61-year-old leader would extend his 11-year rule into the next decade after garnering 5.1 million ballots, taking 51.2% of the vote, ahead of rival Edmundo González who the election agency said earned 4.4 million ballots, or 44.2% of the vote. Maduro had trailed González for weeks by more than 25 percentage points.
The Wall Street Journal reports that residents around Caracas took to banging on pots to protest the result.
According to the newspaper, the result is likely to make it harder for the United States and its allies to resume normal diplomatic relations and fully lift sanctions against the Maduro regime for human-rights abuses and corruption. The country’s economic crisis has triggered the exodus of nearly eight million people – though the government permitted only some 69,000 of the nearly five million voting-age Venezuelans who had left the country to cast a ballot from abroad.
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who backed González after she was banned from running against Maduro, said González had taken about 70% of the votes.
Independent polling firms had González beating Maduro by more than 25 percentage points ahead of the vote. Exit polls had González more than doubling Maduro’s vote.
[Image: Government of Venezuela, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57576080]