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Venezuan longtime leader, Nicolas Maduro, will face one of his greatest political challenges yet, analysts said as Venezuelans head to the polls on Sunday to vote in a highly consequential presidential election.
Maduro, who took the mantle of the ruling Chavismo movement after his predecessor Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013, is seeking his third consecutive six-year term in office. Of the nine other candidates running for the presidency, his biggest challenger is a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions to form a coalition known as the Democratic Unitary Platform.
The opposition movement has maintained its momentum despite sustained government repression, in which their first-choice candidate, María Corina Machado, was disqualified from running. Machado, an avowed capitalist who has promised privatization of several state industries, has since rallied for her replacement, the soft-spoken former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia.
The vote has come at a crucial moment for Venezuela, which has experienced violent repression under Maduro’s watch and the worst economic collapse of a peacetime country in recent history. The oil-rich nation, once the fifth-largest economy in Latin America, has seen its economy shrink in the last decade to the equivalent of a medium-sized city, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.
Punishing sanctions on the regime by the United States and European Union have failed to topple the populist incumbent, who argues that Venezuela’s woes are due to being a victim of an “economic war.”
Around eight million Venezuelans have fled the country amid shortages of vital goods and soaring inflation. The opposition coalition reported minor irregularities, but as of 11 a.m. ET, voting proceedings appeared to be smooth in most of the country, with a high turnout.
There has been mounting concern that the opposition will not see a fair contest as Maduro’s government controls all public institutions in Venezuela and has been accused of rigging previous votes, which it denied. Experts note, however, that concerns of vote tampering may be mitigated by the planned presence of opposition party representatives at each polling station.
Maduro voted at 6 a.m. in Caracas, where he urged citizens to respect the results of the election.
Lewis Musonye
