https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz5rj2mzgevo
Venezuela's electoral commission has announced that incumbent President Nicolas Maduro has won Sunday's presidential election. The opposition is confident that its candidate Edmundo González should have won; polls have also backed this up.
The National Electoral Council, controlled by Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, said that after 80 percent of the ballots had been processed, the incumbent president had 51.2 percent of the vote, while the candidate from the united opposition, Edmundo González, had 44 percent.
Pre-election polls and exit polls had shown a big advantage for González over Maduro, who has ruled for 11 years and under whom Venezuela's economy has fallen into complete disarray. Maduro said after the results were announced that his victory was a triumph of peace and stability. The opposition is confident that the results, like in the previous elections in 2018, were rigged.
“The results cannot be hidden. The country peacefully chose change,” Edmundo González wrote on the X network after the end of the vote, but before the official results were announced. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who was banned from running by the authorities and was replaced by González, published an appeal to the army on X. “I appeal to the military. The Venezuelan people have spoken: they do not want Maduro. The time has come to stand on the right side of history. You have a chance to do it right now,” reads Maria Corina Machado’s tweet.
However, as Reuters notes, the army has always supported Maduro, and before these elections there were no signs that the top military officials were going to renounce the president.
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