Caracas, Venezuela.- Opposition leader María Corina Machado and presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia on Thursday rejected the proposal for new elections in Venezuela made by Brazil and Colombia in response to the crisis generated by the questionable re-election of Nicolás Maduro.
“To suggest ignoring what happened on July 28 is, for me, a lack of respect for Venezuelans who have given everything (…) popular sovereignty is respected,” Machado said in a virtual conference with Chilean and Argentine media, after being asked about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s suggestion.
“The presidential elections in Venezuela were held on July 28 and were overwhelmingly won by Edmundo González Urrutia,” the opposition candidate responded on X, who claims to have won the election with 63 percent of the votes and denounced fraud.
The Brazilian president earlier suggested that Maduro could call new elections to clear up doubts about the results that gave him re-election for a third six-year term in the July 28 vote.
His Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, agreed moments later.
Both Lula and Petro are seeking a solution to the crisis generated in Venezuela after Maduro was proclaimed re-elected president with 52 percent of the votes in a process in which the details of the vote count are still unknown due to a “hacking,” according to claims by the electoral authority and the government.
Maduro “could try to appeal to the people of Venezuela, perhaps even call for an electoral programme, establish criteria for the participation of all candidates (…) and let observers from around the world go and watch the elections,” Lula said in an interview on local radio.
Machado stressed that the elections had already “taken place.”
“Venezuelan society expressed itself in very adverse conditions where there was fraud and yet we still managed to win,” he said.
Maduro has not yet commented, but on July 31, three days after his proclamation, he ruled out repeating the elections.
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