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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appears to have cleared the field of his strongest challengers for July’s elections after the main opposition candidate was banned and his stand-in was unable to register.
Revolutionary socialist Maduro, a former bus driver in power since 2013, has presided over the country’s economic collapse. About three-quarters of the once-rich, oil-exporting nation’s gross domestic product has been lost during Maduro’s presidency, triggering an exodus of 7.7 million people as the economy declines and violent crime rises.
The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has, however, confirmed that Maduro will be its candidate for a new six-year term.
Corina Yoris, the person most likely to mount an effective challenge to Maduro in the presidential election, complained Monday that she was unable to register her candidacy before the midnight deadline.
“My rights as a Venezuelan citizen are violated if I don’t let myself in [computer] system and register my candidacy for the presidency of Venezuela,” Yoris said in a press conference.
Yoris, an 80-year-old university professor, previously unknown politically, was nominated this weekend as a candidate for the main opposition group, the United Platform, after the Maduro government ratified a ban on María Corina Machado’s candidacy. Machado is a longtime Maduro critic who won a landslide victory in opposition primaries last year.
Yoris was chosen as a stand-in because she had no obvious impediments to running, but was unable to access the electoral authority’s computer system or enter the electoral council building to register.
A moderate opposition party, Un Nuevo Tiempo, managed to register its candidate Manuel Rosales before the deadline, according to a social media post by opposition negotiator Stalin González. Rosales did not explain how he was able to register at the last minute, while Yoris was unable to access the registration system.
“We Venezuelans want to participate in decisions, we want to vote and that is why we registered Manuel Rosales,” González wrote on X. “When we opted to abstain, we left Venezuelans without a choice.”
Rosales, 71, is serving a second term as governor of Zulia state in northwestern Venezuela. It is unclear whether the electoral authority, controlled by Maduro’s allies, will allow his candidacy and whether the United Platform will choose to support his campaign.
Machado avoided supporting Rosales in a news conference on Tuesday, saying Yoris remains the main opposition candidate. “What we have been warning for many months has finally come to pass: the regime has chosen its candidates,” Machado said.
Maduro claimed to be “the people’s candidate” when he registered his candidacy on Monday. However, polls show he is unpopular with voters and would overwhelmingly lose a free election to Machado.
The president, whose government is under investigation by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity, has used the crackdown and the specter of allegations of assassination plots to justify arrest warrants for some key members of Machado’s staff – one development that the US State Department described as a “disturbing escalation of repression”.
The restrictions on opposition candidates make it more likely that the United States will reimpose Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela’s oil and gas industry when a temporary easing expires next month. The Biden administration lifted sanctions last October in exchange for the Maduro government’s promise to move toward free and fair elections, an agreement that now lies in tatters.
Argentina’s right-wing government led a group of seven Latin American nations, including Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru, in condemning the Venezuelan government’s latest actions. “This situation . . . raises further questions about the integrity and transparency of the entire electoral process,” read a joint statement released by the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs.