Daily Times

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro won re-election with 51.2% of the vote on Sunday, according to the electoral council, following a campaign marred by claims of opposition intimidation and fears of fraud. Opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who had been leading in independent polls, won 44.2% of the vote.

Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner in Venezuela’s presidential election Sunday, even as his opponents were preparing to dispute the results, setting up a high-stakes showdown that will determine whether the South American nation transitions away from one party rule.

Shortly after midnight, the National Electoral Council said Maduro secured 51% of the vote, overcoming the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González, who garnered 44%.

But the electoral authority, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, didn’t immediately release the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, hampering the opposition’s ability to challenge the results after claiming it had data for only 30% of the ballot boxes.

Foreign leaders held off recognizing the results as the electoral council promised to release official tallies in the “coming hours.” “The Maduro regime should understand that the results it published are difficult to believe,” said Gabriel Boric, the leftist leader of Chile. “We won’t recognize any result that is not verifiable.”

The delay in announcing results — six hours after polls were supposed to close — indicated a deep debate inside the government about how to proceed after Maduro’s opponents came out early in the evening all but claiming victory.

Opposition representatives said tallies they collected from campaign representatives at the polling stations showed Gonzalez trouncing Maduro. Meanwhile, the head of the electoral council said it would release the official voting acts in the coming hours.

Maduro celebrated the result with a few hundreds supporters at the presidential palace. Maduro, in seeking a third term, faced his toughest challenge yet from the unlikeliest of opponents in Gonzalez: a retired diplomat who was unknown to voters before being tapped in April as a last-minute stand-in for opposition powerhouse Maria Corina Machado.

Earlier, opposition leaders celebrating, online and outside a few voting centers, what they assured was a landslide victory for González. “I’m so happy,” said Merling Fernández, a 31-year-old bank employee, as a representative for the opposition campaign walked out of one voting center in a working class neighborhood.