After midnight, with 80% of the votes counted, the Electoral Authority announced Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the presidential elections with 51.2% of the votes compared to 44.2% for the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, supported by the right-wing María Corina Machado. The National Electoral Council (CNE) announced a turnout of 59%, describing the result as “irreversible.” Hours earlier, the electoral command of Edmundo González and María Corina Machado had denounced irregularities in the transmission of the votes and the arbitrary expulsion of witnesses from the polling stations.
The CNE issued the first official statement six hours after the formal closing of the election and in the midst of a climate of tension, declaring the result irreversible with the presentation of 80% of the votes counted, with a 7-point difference between Maduro and González and without percentages for the other 8 candidates, nor the national distribution of the votes.
The opposition rejected the result at a press conference. María Corina Machado announced that “Venezuela has a new president and it is Edmundo González Urrutia”, who according to their data and exit polls had received 70% of the votes.
In the hours leading up to the vote, some presidents and officials from Latin American countries issued statements calling for respect for the results and transparent reporting of data, to which the Venezuelan government responded with a statement warning of an “intervention operation against the electoral process.”
After the result was known, the first to respond was Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who questioned the result of the CNE statement and insisted again on the transparency of the process, stating that he “would not recognize any result that is not verifiable.” This was followed by a statement from the United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, demanding a “fair and transparent” recount of the votes, among other leaders and officials.
For the moment, in the statements of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, they only called for a “civic vigil,” but the doubts about the CNE data open a political crisis whose development and outcome are uncertain. When asked by one of the journalists if they were going to call for people to take to the streets, Edmundo González declared that “nobody is calling for people to take to the streets.”
The dubious way in which the results were presented, the complaint of an alleged hacking of the data transmission by the CNE to extend the day and the first report with an “irreversible” result counting only 80% of the minutes without open and public data, They undoubtedly constitute a flawed and fraudulent process that must be denounced.This is the culmination of an election in which not only the right was banned from the start, but also the entire political spectrum that has been questioning from the left the policies of national surrender and wild capitalism of the Maduro government.
As we had already maintained in this previous report about the elections and their nature, from the beginning it had been orchestrated a process tailored to the government with several possible scenarioswhere they were all an expression of the Venezuelan political crisis and the degradation of the reactionary Bonapartist regime of Maduro, with the interference and strengthening of the right and extreme right (and their former coup sectors), allies of the United States.
That is why this general framework, where None of the candidates defended the interests of the working class and popular sectors but, on the contrary, they agree to continue and deepen pro-capitalist policies and adjustments to workers, the “The working class has no candidate” campaign promoted by the comrades of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSL), the PPT-APR (Patria Para Todos – Popular Revolutionary Alliance), Marea Socialista and the League of Workers for Socialism (LTS, which promotes La Izquierda Diario in Venezuela). This campaign took as its central axes the question of the Workers’ independence and a political programme with an anti-capitalist perspective that workers must govern, which can be read in the Unitary Declaration. The working class has no candidate in this election. They do not represent us! And in the formulation of the vote, calling for a null vote.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
