Venezuela Election 2024: Venezuelans vote, Maduro faces challenge from Gonzalez

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelans will vote on Sunday. Presidential Election The outcome will be either deep political change or another six years of extending the policies that have caused the world's worst peacetime economic collapse.

Whether President Nicolás Maduro or his main rival, former diplomat Edmundo González, is elected, the election will have ripple effects across the Americas. If Maduro is re-elected, both opponents and supporters of the government have signaled they will join the 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already fled the country in search of opportunity abroad.

Polls opened at 6am but at some polling stations across the country voters lined up much earlier and shared water, coffee and snacks for several hours.

Alejandro Zurbaran lined up at 5pm on Saturday to secure the first seat at his polling station. He said he was standing outside his primary school in the hills outside the capital, Caracas, praying for “the future of the country.”

“We are all here for the change we want to see,” Zurbaran, 74, who works in maintenance, said as other voters nodded in agreement.

The number of voters in this presidential election is estimated at about 17 million. Polls close at 6 pm local time, but it is unclear when election officials will announce the first results.

Authorities set Sunday's election to coincide with the 70th birthday of Hugo Chavez, the revered leftist firebrand who betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution to Maduro, who died of cancer in 2013. But Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela have suppressed wages, stoked hunger, crippled the oil industry and Separating Families For migration.

Maduro, 61, said: I was able to line up It has supported a single candidate after years of internal party divisions and election boycotts thwarted its ambitions of toppling the ruling coalition.

Gonzalez was elected in April as a last-minute opposition deputy and represents the opposition coalition. Maria Corina MachadoHe has been barred from running for any public office for 15 years by the Supreme Court of Justice, which is controlled by President Maduro.

Machado, a former congressman, won an opposition primary in October with a landslide victory, receiving more than 90% of the vote. After being barred from running for president, she chose a university professor as her replacement, but the National Electoral Commission banned her from registering as well. So Gonzalez, a political newcomer, was chosen.

There are eight candidates challenging Maduro in Sunday's vote, but Gonzalez is the only one who poses a threat to Maduro's power.

After the vote, President Maduro said he would recognize the election results and called on all other candidates to do the same.

“No one will create chaos in Venezuela,” Maduro said. “I recognize and will continue to recognize the electoral jury and the official announcements, and I will ensure that they are recognized.”

Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves and was once Latin America's most advanced economy, but it has plummeted since Maduro came to power. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation of more than 130,000 percent first sparked social unrest and then mass migration.

Economic sanctions U.S. attempts to remove Maduro from power after his 2018 re-election – which the U.S. and dozens of other countries condemned as illegitimate – only deepened the crisis.

Maduro has touted economic stability as his biggest selling point to voters in this election, citing entrepreneurship, a stable currency and low inflation. The International Monetary Fund projects the economy, which shrank 71% between 2012 and 2020, to grow 4% this year, the fastest among Latin American countries.

But most Venezuelans have not seen their quality of life improve, with many earning less than $200 a month and families struggling to afford basic necessities. Get a second or third jobA basket of basic groceries enough to feed a family of four for a month costs an estimated $385.

Judith Cantilla, 52, voted in favor of changing those conditions.

“For me, change in Venezuela means having jobs, having security, having medicines in hospitals, good salaries for teachers and doctors,” she said as she voted in Caracas' working-class Petare neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Liana Ibarra, a manicurist in the Caracas metropolitan area, stood in line at 3 a.m. on Sunday carrying a backpack packed with water, coffee and cassava snacks, finding at least 150 people ahead of her.

“There used to be a lot of apathy towards elections, but that's not the case anymore,” Ibarra said.

She said that if Gonzalez loses, she plans to ask a relative living in the U.S. to sponsor her and her son's legal immigration application. “I can't take it anymore,” she said.

The opposition has sought to exploit the vast inequalities that have resulted from a crisis that has seen Venezuelans abandon their national currency, the bolivar, for the U.S. dollar.

Messrs. Gonzalez and Machado focused their campaigns in Venezuela's vast interior, which has not seen the economic boom seen in Caracas in recent years, and they promised a government that would create enough jobs to attract Venezuelans living abroad. To get home And then they reunite with their families.

After casting his vote at a polling station next to a church in an upscale neighborhood of Caracas, Gonzalez called on the country's armed forces to respect “the decision of the people.”

“What we see today is a procession of joy and hope,” Gonzalez, 74, told reporters. “We turn hatred into love. We turn poverty into progress. We turn corruption into sincerity. We turn parting into reunion.”

About a quarter of Venezuelans would consider leaving the country if Maduro wins Sunday, according to an April poll by Caracas-based Delfos, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Most of the Venezuelans who have emigrated in the past 11 years have settled in Latin America and the Caribbean, but in recent years many have begun to turn their attention to the United States.

The two campaigns stand out not only for the political movements they represent but also for how they have addressed the hopes and fears of voters.

Maduro's rallies featured lively electronic meringue dancing and speeches attacking his opponents. I was engrossed Maduro has hit back after left-wing allies such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticised his comments about “bloodshed” if he lost, his son told Spanish newspaper El Pais that the ruling party was peacefully hand over the presidency A loss would be a rare admission of vulnerability at odds with Maduro's camp's triumphalist tone.

In contrast, at the Gonzalez and Machado rallies, people cried and chanted, Freedom! Freedom! ” People shouted as they passed by. Devout Catholic Some recited the rosary, walked along highways and passed through military checkpoints to reach the event, while others made video calls to emigrated relatives to catch a glimpse of the candidates.

“We don't want any more Venezuelans to leave the country. To those who have left, we will do everything in our power to bring them back here and we will welcome them with open arms,” ​​Gonzalez said Sunday.

Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman and Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report.