Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro won re-election with 51.2% of votes cast on Sunday, July 28, the country's electoral council announced, after a campaign tainted by claims of opposition intimidation and fears of fraud.
Elvis Amoroso, president of the national electoral council (CNE), in its majority loyal to the government, told reporters 44.2% of votes had gone to opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. The opposition has contested this figure, saying it garnered 70% of the vote.
Maduro, 61, addressed supporters minutes after the announcement, saying: "there will be peace, stability and justice."
Since 2013, Maduro has been at the helm of the once-wealthy petro-state, where GDP has dropped by 80% in a decade, pushing more than seven million of its 30 million citizens to emigrate. He has been accused of locking up critics and harassing the opposition in a climate of rising authoritarianism. Maduro had previously warned of a "bloodbath" if he loses.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately expressed "serious concerns" that the result did not reflect the will of Venezuelan voters. "It's critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that the electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of votes," Blinken said.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric, on Sunday, reacted doubtfully to the results announced by Venezuela's electoral body declaring Maduro the winner: "Maduro's regime must understand that the results it publishes are hard to believe," Boric wrote, on the social media platform X. He went on to demand "total transparency of the minutes and the process, and that international observers not committed to the government account for the veracity of the results," adding that Chile "will not recognize any result that is not verifiable."
As his supporters celebrated, Venezuela's opposition coalition, on Monday, rejected the election victory claimed by Maduro and announced by a loyalist electoral authority, saying it had garnered 70% of the vote, and not 44% as reported by the authority. "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, adding: "We won."
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.
Gonzalez Urrutia had said the opposition was "prepared to defend" the vote and trusted "our armed forces to respect the decision of our people." He added there had been a "massive" voter turnout.
Ballots were cast on machines that print out paper receipts, which are placed into a container. The electronic votes go directly to a centralized CNE database. The opposition had deployed about 90,000 volunteer election monitors to polling stations countrywide.
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.
Rejecting opinion polls, the government relied on its own numbers to assert Maduro would defeat Gonzalez Urrutia, a little-known 74-year-old former diplomat. Maduro counts 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.
Sunday's election is 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 reelection, which was rejected as a sham by dozens of Western and Latin American countries. Yet the sanctions were snapped back into place after Maduro reneged on agreed conditions.
Washington is keen for a return to stability in Venezuela – an ally of Cuba, Russia and China that boasts the world's largest oil reserves but 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 health care and education systems in disrepair and the population enduring biting shortages of electricity and fuel.
The government blames sanctions, but observers also point the finger at corruption and government inefficiency. Machado said earlier Sunday that if Maduro "grabs power," another "three, four, five million" Venezuelans will likely join the exodus. "What's at stake here goes beyond our borders, beyond Venezuela," she said.
Concerns over the fairness of the vote were further stoked when Caracas blocked several international observers, including four Latin American ex-presidents, at the last minute. The foreign ministers of seven Latin American nations called Sunday for the electoral process to "fully respect the popular will" of the Venezuelan people.
About 21 million Venezuelans are registered as voters, but only an estimated 17 million people still remaining in the country were eligible to cast ballots.