“It’s a disrespect,” says Maria Corina Machado. The opposition leader stressed that the elections “been a place.” “Venezuelan society expressed itself in very adverse conditions where there was fraud and yet we managed to win,” he said.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado and presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia rejected Thursday the proposal for new elections in Venezuela made by Brazil and Colombia in the face of the crisis generated by the questioned re-election of Nicolás Maduro.
“To know the fact that happened on July 28 for me is a disrespect to the Venezuelans who have given everything (…) popular sovereignty is respected,” Machado said at a virtual conference with Chilean and Argentine media, after being consulted on the suggestion of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“The presidential elections in Venezuela were held on July 28 and were won overwhelmingly by Edmundo González Urrutia,” the opposition candidate reacted in X, who defends having won the election with 63% of the vote and denounced fraud.
The Brazilian president suggested earlier that Maduro could call new elections to clear doubts about the results given to him for re-election for a third six-year term in the July 28 elections.
His Colombian pair, Gustavo Petro, coincided moments later.
Both Lula and Petro are looking for a way out of the crisis generated in Venezuela after Maduro’s proclamation as president re-elected with 52% of the votes in a process in which the detail of the scrutiny for a “jacket” is not yet known, according to the electoral authority and the government.
Maduro “could try to call on the people of Venezuela, perhaps even convene an electoral program, establish criteria for the participation of all candidates (…) and let observers from all over the world go to see the elections,” Lula said in an interview on a local radio station.
Machado stressed that the elections have already “taken place.” “Venezuelan society expressed itself in very adverse conditions where there was fraud and yet we managed to win.”
Maduro has not yet spoken, but on July 31, three days after his proclamation, he ruled out repeating the elections.
This article has been translated after first appearing in Diario El Mundo