Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is going ahead with the inauguration of a powerful new assembly, albeit with a 24-hour delay, even though the British firm hired to handle the vote said the turnout figure given by his government was too high.
Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega, one of Maduro’s most outspoken critics, said she has opened an investigation into what she called scandalous electoral fraud.
Although the swearing-in has been put off to today, the opposition planned to go ahead with a big march yesterday against the new assembly.
Photo: AFP//PRESIDENCY
Maduro denied the accusations of trampling on democracy in Venezuela with Sunday’s controversial election for an all-powerful “Constituent Assembly,” dismissing them as a “reaction by the international enemy.”
The technology firm hired to handle the vote, Smartmatic, said in a London news conference that the official figures from the election were “tampered with” to make turnout appear greater than it was.
Ortega said the company’s assessment was just “one more element of the fraudulent, illegal and unconstitutional process” initiated by the socialist ruler.
“We are facing an unprecedented, serious incident that represents a crime,” Ortega told CNN.
The electoral authority — criticized as a Maduro mouthpiece — denied the vote-tampering allegation as “an irresponsible contention based on estimates with no grounding in the data.”
The new 545-member body — whose members include Maduro’s wife and son — will have sweeping powers to dissolve the opposition-majority congress, pass laws and write a new constitution.
Despite months of violent protests and international condemnation, Maduro insists it is the solution to a drawn-out economic and political crisis gripping Venezuela.
The assembly was originally due to start work yesterday, but Maduro postponed the launch to today in the face of opposition plans for massive protests.
“It has been proposed that the installation of the National Constituent Assembly, instead of being held tomorrow, be organized in peace and calm, with all necessary protocol, on Friday at 11am,” he said.
He said the reason for the delay was that 35 newly elected members had not yet been officially declared by electoral authorities.
Venezuela has been rocked by four months of clashes at anti-Maduro protests that have left more than 125 people dead.
Sunday’s vote brought the crisis to a boiling point, drawing international condemnation.
The US imposed direct sanctions on Maduro, calling him a “dictator,” while the EU joined the US, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina in saying it would not recognize the new assembly.
Smartmatic chief executive Antonio Mugica said the evidence of vote-tampering was glaring.
“Based on the robustness of our system, we know, without any doubt, that the turnout ... was manipulated,” he said.
“We estimate the difference between the actual participation and the one announced by authorities is at least 1 million votes,” he said.
Venezuela’s pro-government electoral authority had claimed more than 8 million voters took part — 40 percent of the electorate.
The opposition says turnout was closer to 3.5 million, mostly state employees fearful for their jobs.
Significantly, the opposition had held an unofficial referendum on July 16 in which it said 7.6 million Venezuelans voted against the new assembly — just under the level of support the government claimed on Sunday.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees