Unrest overwhelms Venezuela as election marred by accusations of fraud

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets across Venezuela to protest Nicolás Maduro’s disputed victory in the nation’s presidential election. Protestors have set fire to images of the “dictator”, toppled statues of him – along with those of Hugo Chávez – and are clashing with armed police and paramilitaries as unrest spirals.   

On Monday, Venezuela’s election commission formally declared Nicolás Maduro’s victory with 51% of the vote. The opposition has defiantly countered that their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won a landslide 73% of the vote. 

González declared on X: “We have in our hands the records that demonstrate our historic, categorical and mathematically irreversible triumph”, linking to a now downed website of documents and exit polls proving his victory. 

Despite González’s frontrunner status, the former ambassador is not the key figure of the opposition alliance, serving as a stand-in for María Corina Machado. An engineer turned self-described Thatcherite politician, Machado has been the leading voice of the unified anti-Maduro political bloc, weathering through assassination attempts, state efforts to annul the primary process, and a 15-year ban on her holding office. 

Latin American responses are split, with El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Argentina supporting Machado by denouncing the official result, while leftist governments in Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Bolivia have rallied behind Maduro. Several other key actors, including Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia are expected to announce a joint-statement calling for “transparency”. 

The UK Foreign Office was quick to comment that they “are concerned by allegations of serious irregularities in the counting and declared results of Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela”, echoing sentiments posed by the US Secretary of State who expressed “serious concerns” over the election’s validity.

Both the UK and the US have cast doubts on President Maduro’s legitimacy before, supporting Juan Guaidó – an opposition politician who went on to lead a failed coup – as Venezuela’s President during the nation’s 2019 constitutional crisis. 

The election’s tumultuous and contested result follows years of deteriorating economic conditions and political repression. Over six million Venezuelans, roughly a third of the population, have fled the crumbling nation during Maduro’s presidency, leading Venezuela to outpace even Ukraine in total number of refugees. The small relief brought by billions in lifted American sanctions is unlikely to hold as the Blinken-brokered deal sought to trade electoral transparency for sanctions relief. 

In another sign of global polarisation, China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin have congratulated Maduro, undermining the UN’s calls for the release of full election data and defying the sceptical Western and Latin American detractors. Nine Latam countries are joining an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) tomorrow as concerns over civil war loom.

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