Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday claimed a landslide victory in closely watched regional elections in Venezuela, based on official results that the opposition immediately rejected.
Maduro’s Socialist Party won governorships of 17 of the 23 states with the opposition Democratic Union Roundtable (MUD) coalition taking only five, with one state still undecided, according to the results announced by the Venezuelan National Elections Council.
“We do not recognize any of the results at this time. We are facing a very serious moment for the country,” said the MUD’s campaign director Gerardo Blyde, who demanded a full audit of the vote.
Maduro said his government had scored an “emphatic victory” over its rivals by leaving the opposition with only five states, with his socialists still in line to take one further state where the results were still in dispute early yesterday.
Maduro and his allies held 20 outgoing governorships.
The results amounted to a crushing blow to the opposition, which had characterized the elections as a referendum on Maduro, after months of deadly street protests earlier this year had failed to unseat him.
“We have serious suspicions, doubts, about the results that are going to be announced in a few minutes,” Blyde told reporters at a hastily arranged news conference even before the official results were announced.
International powers accuse Maduro of dismantling democracy by taking over state institutions in the wake of an economic collapse caused by a fall in the price of oil, its main source of revenue.
Last week, an IMF report said there was no end in sight to the suffering of the Venezuelan people with food and medicine shortages intensifying a “humanitarian crisis.”
An ebullient Maduro told supporters that “Chavismo” — the brand of socialism he inherited from former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez 2013 — had won the popular vote across the country.
“We have 17 governorships, 54 percent of the votes, 61 percent participation, 75 percent of the governorates and the country has strengthened,” he said. “I ask that we celebrate with joy, music, dance, but in peace, with respect to the adversary.”
Public opinion surveys had predicted that the opposition would win between 11 and 18 state governorships, despite alleged government dirty tricks, which included relocating hundreds of polling stations away from areas where it had high support.
“All the pre-trial opinion studies, all our counts, are very different from the results that are going to be announced. We have already alerted the international community and we are alerting the country,” Blyde had said earlier.
Sunday’s polls were the first contested by the opposition since the legislative elections in 2015 that gave it a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly.
Turnout was more than 61 percent, with many polling stations remaining open past the 6pm closing time to cope with lines of voters after a day of peaceful voting.
The MUD have seen Maduro’s tighten his grip on power after facing down four months of protests that killed 125 people between April and July, forming a Constituent Assembly packed with his own allies and wresting legislative power from the opposition-dominated National Assembly.
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