Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s governing party has swept parliamentary and regional elections that were boycotted by the opposition.
Preliminary results released by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on Monday showed that the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies won 82.68 percent of votes cast the previous day for seats in the National Assembly.
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That result ensures that the party will maintain control of key levers of power, including the attorney general’s office and the country’s top court, whose members are elected by the 285-seat assembly.
CNE also said that 23 out of 24 state governor positions were won by the government flagging a setback for the opposition, which previously controlled four states.
Turnout in the elections was 8.9 million or roughly 42 percent of 21 million voters eligible to cast their ballots. CNE chief Carlos Quintero noted that was the same figure as in the 2021 elections.
However, the country’s main opposition leaders had urged voters to boycott the election in protest over July’s 2024 presidential election. The opposition insists that it won that race but authorities declared Maduro the winner.
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Opposition figurehead Maria Corina Machado declared in a post on X late on Sunday that in some areas of the country, up to 85 percent of eligible voters snubbed the election, which she slammed as an “enormous farce that the regime is trying to stage to bury its defeat” in last year’s election.
Maduro, however, shrugged off the boycott.
“When the opponent withdraws from the field, we advance and occupy the terrain,” he said matter-of-factly.
According to journalists and social media posts, turnout was noticeably low in Venezuela’s main cities. Still, images posted by the government party showed scores of people lining up to vote in areas like Trujillo and the Amazons.
Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo, reporting from Argentina, noted that during the campaign, the opposition had been divided on the boycott call, making it difficult to present a more forceful challenge against Maduro.
She added that most analysts have said that they “could not guarantee if the elections were free and fair”.
Tensions were high on Sunday, with more than 400,000 security agents deployed to monitor the vote and more than 70 people arrested.
Among those detained was leading opposition member Juan Pablo Guanipa on charges of heading a “terrorist network” that planned to “sabotage” the vote.
The government, which has warned of foreign-backed coup plots many times in the past, said dozens of suspected mercenaries had entered the country from Colombia, prompting the closure of the busy border with its neighbour until after the election.
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Maduro’s success in recent elections comes despite the decline of the economy, once the envy of Latin America, following years of mismanagement and sanctions, with more on the way.
United States President Donald Trump has recently revoked permission for oil giant Chevron to continue pumping Venezuelan crude, potentially depriving Maduro’s administration of a vital economic lifeline.
Washington has also revoked deportation protection from 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in the US and expelled hundreds of others to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
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