CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Polling stations are open in Venezuela for voting Sunday. Presidential Election The outcome will be either deep political change or another six years of extending the policies that have caused the world’s worst peacetime economic collapse.
Whether President Nicolás Maduro or his main rival, former diplomat Edmundo González, is elected, the election will have ripple effects across the Americas. If Maduro is re-elected, both opponents and supporters of the government have signaled they will join the 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already fled the country in search of opportunity abroad.
Voting begins at 6 a.m. local time. The number of eligible voters is estimated at around 17 million.
Authorities set Sunday’s election to coincide with the 70th birthday of Hugo Chavez, the revered leftist firebrand who betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution to Maduro, who died of cancer in 2013. But Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela have suppressed wages, stoked hunger, crippled the oil industry and Separating Families For migration.
Maduro, 61, said: I was able to line up It has supported a single candidate after years of internal party divisions and election boycotts thwarted its ambitions of toppling the ruling coalition.
Gonzalez was elected in April as a last-minute opposition deputy and represents the opposition coalition. Maria Corina MachadoHe has been barred from running for any public office for 15 years by the Supreme Court of Justice, which is controlled by President Maduro.
More than 50 countries will hold elections in 2024
Machado, a former congressman, won an opposition primary in October with a landslide victory, receiving more than 90% of the vote. After being barred from running for president, she chose a university professor as her replacement, but the National Electoral Commission banned her from registering as well. So Gonzalez, a political newcomer, was chosen.
There are eight candidates challenging Maduro in Sunday’s vote, but Gonzalez is the only one who poses a threat to Maduro’s power.
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and was once Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it has plummeted since Maduro came to power. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation of more than 130,000 percent first sparked social unrest and then mass migration.
Sanctions Pressure from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to remove Maduro from power after his 2018 reelection – which the United States and dozens of other countries have condemned as unjust – has only deepened the crisis.
Maduro has crisscrossed Venezuela in recent days, inaugurating hospital wards and highways and visiting rural areas he hasn’t set foot in for years. His appeal to voters has been one of economic stability, underscored by talk of entrepreneurship, a stable currency and low inflation.
Commercial activity has increased in the capital, Caracas, since the pandemic and the International Monetary Fund predicts that the economy, which shrank 71% between 2012 and 2020, is expected to grow 4% this year, one of the fastest rates in Latin America.
“They tried to control our people,” Maduro said of the United States. At the final meeting on Thursday “But today we stand tall and are ready for victory on July 28th,” he said in Caracas.
But most Venezuelans have not seen their quality of life improve, with many earning less than $200 a month and families struggling to afford basic necessities. Get a second or third jobA basket of basic groceries enough to feed a family of four for a month costs an estimated $385.
The opposition has sought to exploit the vast inequalities that have resulted from a crisis that has seen Venezuelans abandon their national currency, the bolivar, for the U.S. dollar.
Messrs. Gonzalez and Machado focused their campaigns in Venezuela’s vast interior, which has not seen the economic boom seen in Caracas in recent years, and they promised a government that would create enough jobs to attract Venezuelans living abroad. To get home And then they reunite with their families.
About a quarter of Venezuelans would consider leaving the country if Maduro wins Sunday, according to an April poll by Caracas-based Delfos, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Most of the Venezuelans who have emigrated in the past 11 years have settled in Latin America and the Caribbean, but in recent years many have begun to turn their attention to the United States.
The two campaigns stand out not only for the political movements they represent but also for how they have addressed the hopes and fears of voters.
Maduro’s rallies featured lively electronic meringue dancing and speeches attacking his opponents. I was engrossed Maduro has hit back after left-wing allies such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticised his comments about “bloodshed” if he lost, his son told Spanish newspaper El Pais that the ruling party was peacefully hand over the presidency A loss would be a rare admission of vulnerability at odds with Maduro’s camp’s triumphalist tone.
In contrast, at the Gonzalez and Machado rallies, people cried and chanted, Freedom! Freedom! ” People shouted as they passed by. Devout Catholic Some recited the rosary, walked along highways and passed through military checkpoints to reach the event, while others made video calls to emigrated relatives to catch a glimpse of the candidates.
At a rally in mid-May, Gonzalez, 74, asked supporters to imagine “a country where our airports and borders are filled with children being returned home.”
___
Associated Press writer Joshua Goodman contributed to this report.
