By Anatoly Kurmanaev
President Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner in a presidential vote Sunday that was marred by irregularities. Officials at some polling places refused to release paper tallies of the electronic vote count, and there were widespread reports of fraud and voter intimidation. Here are initial takeaways from Venezuela’s election.
Many fear a return to instability.
The government’s announcement that Maduro had beaten his opponent, Edmundo González, by 7 percentage points instantly created a grim scenario for a country that only recently has started emerging from one of the largest economic collapses in modern history.
The results announced by the government-controlled electoral council varied wildly — by up to 30 percentage points — from most public polls and from the opposition’s sample of results obtained directly from voting centers. And there were many reports of major irregularities and problems at those voting centers.
The opposition leader María Corina Machado, who spearheaded González’s campaign, on Monday morning called the results “impossible.”
Some opposition supporters could take to the streets to protest the result. That could plunge Venezuela into a new period of political unrest, like those in 2014, 2017 and 2019, when security forces aligned with Maduro used deadly force to crush demonstrations.
Officials from several countries in the Americas, including the United States, expressed doubts about the announced results, raising the likelihood that a new term for Maduro would not be widely recognized abroad, either.
The opposition’s monitoring effort was blocked.
After a campaign marked by intensifying efforts by Maduro’s allies to rein in the opposition — including arrests of opposition campaign workers, intimidation and vote suppression — the opposition bet heavily on an effort to have supporters on hand to get a physical printout of the voting tally from every voting machine after the polls closed.
That access is allowed by Venezuelan election law. But by early Monday morning, González’s campaign said it had obtained only 40% of the tallies. In some places, monitors were barred from entering polling places or they never appeared in the first place. Often, election officials simply refused to hand over the tallies.
That will complicate efforts by the opposition to prove undeniably that the vote had been tampered with.
The results could be disastrous for Venezuela’s economy.
After years of fighting Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan businesspeople and foreign investors had largely made peace with his government in recent years. Sanctions imposed by the United States had forced Maduro to ditch some extreme policies like price and currency controls. The private sector was given an increasingly prominent role, public attacks against business owners had stopped and hyperinflation and rampant crime subsided somewhat.
The increased support from the private sector led to hopes that a credible result would keep the improvements coming and lead to some sort of political settlement. That appears unlikely now, and the dubious election results could test the thaw between Maduro and business leaders, and could possibly trigger a new wave of international sanctions.
Most critically, the result is unlikely to allow the Biden administration to unwind its sweeping economic sanctions against Venezuela. That would stunt the economic recovery, and is likely to lead to another wave of migration from a nation that has seen the exodus of 1 in 5 citizens in the past decade.
A smooth Venezuelan election that would have led to greater economic opening also suited the country’s Latin American neighbors, including Maduro’s old allies, the leftist governments of Brazil and Colombia.
The region has received the bulk of Venezuelan migration, leading to an anti-immigration political backlash in some places.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil took a surprisingly strong stand against Maduro last week. “When you lose, you leave,” he told reporters. He sent his top foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, to Caracas for the election, and Amorim’s position on the vote could become a bellwether for the region.
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