The low participation, indicated unofficial information released by local journalists, prevailed on Sunday in the parliamentary elections and for governor held in Venezuela, which, as happened other times in the recent history of the country, did not have the participation of the vast majority of opposition parties.
With opposing leaders in prison and others in exile, and after the 2024 presidential dispute ended with allegations of fraud that remains to this day, the strongest opposition to Chavisma boycotted the election called by the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.
As expected, and maintaining the classic narrative of Chavismo, the Venezuelan dictatorship ignored the low participation and anticipated, through its leaders, a crushing victory that, according to them, will further solidify the power of Maduro.
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The election occurred a few days after a wave of arrests of about 70 opposition leaders accused of being part of a “terrorist network” trying to sabotage the elections.
Just over 21 million voters were summoned to the polls to elect 285 deputies to the National Assembly and 24 governors, including for the first time the representation of a newly created state to the territory of Essiquibo, disputed with Guyana for over a century. On the issue, Maduro said on Sunday that “earlier than ever” Guyana will have to:
“Irfan Ali, Guyana president, an exxonmobil employee, sooner or later he will have to sit with me to talk and accept Venezuelan sovereignty,” Maduro said after voting in Caracas and before the results are known. “It is the birth of the new Venezuelan sovereignty. The Guyana Cooperative Republic has been an illegal occupant as an inheritance of the British Empire, who illegally occupied this territory.”
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Maduro also announced that he will postpone his proposal to reform the Constitution by January next year and announced that he will present a bill to a “community circuit” voting system. Any change in the Magna Carta requires approval in popular referendum.
“I said on behalf of the Constitutional Reform Committee (…) and we agreed to prepare a more inclusive, more open, more dialogical and more timely consultation and debate process to hand over the Constitutional Reform project to the new National Assembly in January,” said Maduro.
The voting process began at 6am (7am in Brasilia) and, in the first hour, most voting centers in downtown Caracas were empty, with only a handful of voters in line. The image contrasts with the high participation recorded in the 28 July presidential elections. The ballot boxes were open until 6 pm (19h in Brasilia), with an hour extension for the sections where voters were still waiting in the queues.
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“I won’t vote because we need to get rid of this regime now,” AFP Mirian Cristina Pérez, a 73 -year -old retired educator from San Cristóbal (Táchira, on the Colombian border). “This is so that they see that we are in a democracy, when everyone knows that this is not the case.”
Prison wave
Currently, Chavismo, in power for 25 years, has occupied 253 of the 277 seats in the National Assembly, after the opposition was withdrawn from the 2020 legislative elections. It also controls 19 of the 23 governances.
In a statement published on his X account, opponent Edmundo González, who ran against Maduro in the presidential elections, described the election as a “scam” that tried to disguise him as election, but could not deceive “neither the country nor the world.” “The people did not endorse a simulation that sought to legitimize what is inherently illegitimate,” he said.
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A small dissent of the opposition disregarded the call of the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, and participated in Sunday’s elections as twice presidential candidate Henrique Capriles.
“Which is better: to have a voice and fight within Parliament or, as we have done on other occasions, to withdraw from the electoral process and leave the parliament entirely in the hands of the government?” Capriles said after voting.
The National Electoral Council (CNE), accused of serving the president, proclaimed mature winner of the past presidential elections, without disclosing the detailed investigation of the votes, as required by law. The authority alleged an attack on the system, which now says it was armored. Protests after Maduro’s proclamation resulted in 28 deaths and more than 2,400 arrests.
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Disputa Pelo Essquibo
In the case of Essequibo, a governor and eight parliamentarians will be elected, who will initially have a symbolic mandate, as Guiana manages this rich region of 160,000 km². Guianense President Irfan Ali denounced the election as a “threat,” while the International Court of Justice (CIJ), who judges a case related to the dispute, asked Venezuela to refrain from holding these comics.
Guyana asked the CIJ to ratify the boundaries established in an arbitral report of 1899, but Venezuela appeals to the 1966 Geneva Agreement, before the UK Guyana independence, which nullified this decision and established the foundations for a negotiated solution.
