Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is stepping up his rhetoric ahead of elections at the end of the month. Maduro, who is running for a third mandate, talks about the possibility of war or a bloodbath if he does not win, AFP agency. However, according to polls, the current president is significantly behind the opposition candidate.
Maduro said at a campaign rally on Saturday that in the July 28 election, voters will choose whether Venezuela will be a country of peace or a country rocked by conflict. “Peace or war,” Maduro told the rally, adding that conflict is imminent if the opposition wins. This week, the president also said that if the opposition wins, the country is at risk of a bloodbath, which he says the opposition forces are preparing for.
Maduro is trying to mobilize his voters with sharp statements about the possibility of conflict. The prospects for the president, who has ruled the country since 2013, are not favorable. Polls by respected agencies show that opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia is ahead. According to the Delphos agency, which mapped preferences in the first half of July, 59 percent of voters would vote for him and only 25 percent for Maduro.
Ex-diplomat González Urrutia was practically unknown to the wider Venezuelan public just a few months ago. He entered the presidential race as a substitute for the opposition leader María Corina Machadová, whose candidacy in the presidential elections the authorities refused to register.
According to analysts, it is questionable how Maduro and his loyalists would react to a possible election loss. Roughly half of Venezuelans said they would be willing to take to the streets in the event of electoral fraud. Mark Feierstein, former adviser to US President Barack Obama on Latin America, believes that Maduro has only two options. “He will either accept defeat or start repression, which is not as easy as people think,” Feierstein is quoted by the Financial Times.
Maduro also controls the central electoral body, the CNE, and for many Venezuelans it is unimaginable that this pro-government institution would announce a victory for the opposition. “The best-case scenario for an opposition victory is that the government suspends vote counting and starts negotiations,” an unnamed Venezuelan source deeply familiar with the workings of the country’s institutions told the Financial Times.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
