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The hope of Venezuelans to have a new government far from the tyranny that Chavismo left in the Bolivarian nation was once again hit by corruption and Nicolas Maduro He was declared the winner of the presidential elections for the third time.
Eleven years in power is not enough and after counting 80 percent of the votes, the National Electoral Council, the body in charge of the development of electoral processes in Venezuela, declared that Maduro defeated his main opponent, Edmundo González, with 51 percent of the votes.
Thus, shortly after midnight on Monday, July 29, the electoral authorities declared that Nicolás Maduro will be the president of Venezuela for the period 2025-2031, and it will be another six years when the Venezuelan people will have the opportunity to overthrow the officialdom.
The ballot presented the name of 10 candidates to choose from for the next presidential term, including the current president Nicolás Maduro, along with nine contenders: Edmundo González Urrutia (PUD), Benjamín Rausseo (CONDE), Antonio Ecarri (Alianza del Lápiz) , Daniel Ceballos (AREPA), Luis Eduardo Martínez (AD), José Brito (PV), Claudio Fermín (SPV), Javier Bertucci (EL CAMBIO) and Enrique Márquez (CG).
The opposition, led by Edmundo Gonzáles, described the vote counting as fraudulent and irregular, after the electoral authority gave it only 44 percent of the votes.
The statement by the National Electoral Council of Venezuela has been met with strong indignation in several countries, where their leaders expressed their skepticism of the official results.
The presidential spokesperson of Argentina, Manuel Adorni, said at a press conference: "We condemn the electoral fraud perpetrated by the regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Argentina demands total transparency and vote counting. We are not going to validate any results without the support of international observers, who are obviously not puppets of the Chavista regime.
These statements have been added to that of the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who described the Maduro regime as "genocidal, fraudulent, illegitimate, shameless and undemocratic"; Colombia requested a total count of the votes, while Spain requested the minutes "table by table"; The results were also questioned by the United States, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama and Uruguay.
In contrast, China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia congratulated Maduro on his victory.
The president of Mexico, André Manuel López Obrador, said that he will wait for all the votes to be counted, but that if the current trend of the National Electoral Council persists, he will recognize Maduro's victory.
Allegations of electoral irregularities began to emerge on Sunday night as votes were being counted, including the fact that opposition witnesses were denied access to the CNE headquarters while the authority was counting the votes.
The electoral authority, controlled by Maduro loyalists, did not immediately publish the count of each of the 15,797 voting centers throughout the country, hindering the challenge of the result.
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