World leaders and electoral observers are calling on Venezuela to release the complete results of the country’s presidential vote, as President Nicolas Maduro was formally declared the winner of an election that the opposition says was marred by fraud.
Few shops were open and public transport was scarce in the normally bustling Venezuelan capital of Caracas on Monday as the National Electoral Council (CNE) said Maduro had secured another six-year term as president.
The CNE’s Elvis Amoroso said the Venezuelan people had re-elected Maduro by a majority to be president “for the period 2025-2031”.
Speaking in a televised address from Caracas, Maduro, 61, claimed – without providing evidence – that “an attempt is being made to impose a coup d’etat in Venezuela”.
“We already know this movie, and this time, there will be no kind of weakness,” he added, saying that Venezuela’s “law will be respected”.
The electoral authority, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, has not released the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling stations across Venezuela after Sunday’s vote, fuelling questions and claims of fraud.
Opposition representatives said earlier that the counts they collected from campaign representatives at the centres had shown opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trouncing Maduro.
But the CNE said Gonzalez had failed to defeat the president, earning 44 percent support compared with Maduro’s 51 percent.
“The Venezuelans and the entire world know what happened,” Gonzalez said in his first remarks since the results were announced. He and his allies have asked supporters to remain calm and called on the government to avoid stoking conflict.
Eating breakfast on a bench next to an unopened business in Caracas, 28-year-old Venezuelan voter Deyvid Cadenas said on Monday morning that he felt cheated.
“I don’t believe yesterday’s results,” Cadenas, who cast a ballot in a presidential election for the first time on Sunday, told The Associated Press news agency.
As political uncertainty continues to swirl in the South American nation, leaders from across the region and around the world have urged Venezuela to release a full breakdown of the election results.
A spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UN chief was calling “for complete transparency” and “the timely publication of the election results and their breakdown by polling stations”.
“The secretary-general trusts that all electoral disputes will be addressed and resolved peacefully, and calls on all Venezuelan political leaders and their supporters for moderation,” Stephane Dujarric told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.
The Carter Center, which sent a team of electoral observers to Venezuela for the election, also called on the electoral authority to immediately publish the presidential voting results by polling station.
“The information contained in the polling station-level results forms as transmitted to the CNE is critical to our assessment and important for all Venezuelans,” the group said in a statement.
‘They robbed us’
Maduro, who first came to power in 2013 after the death of his mentor and predecessor Hugo Chavez, has presided over an economic collapse that has pushed millions of people to leave the country.
Venezuela also has been isolated internationally amid sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and others, which have crippled an already struggling oil industry.
Reporting from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo said there was an immediate sense of disappointment amongst Venezuelans “who were hoping for change” at the ballot box on Sunday.
Many also expressed anger over the election results and how they were announced. “The crucial data [showing] where the votes are coming from” has not yet been released, she noted.
Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek Saab, a Maduro ally, said on Monday that his office had launched an investigation into an alleged cyber attack on the electoral system.
Saab accused opposition leaders of being involved, but did not offer any evidence to back up his claim.
“What we’re seeing from the government right now is a government that is saying it won the elections, saying that it’s under attack,” Bo reported.
“This is not what people on the streets are saying. Millions of Venezuelans are convinced that there was massive fraud.”
On Monday morning, a cacophony of banging came from Caracas’s Petare and 23 de Enero areas – traditionally major working-class bastions for the United Socialist Party – as neighbours took part in a “cacerolazo”, a traditional Latin American protest in which people bang pots and pans.
“Maduro yesterday shattered my greatest dream, to see my only daughter again, who went to Argentina three years ago,” retiree Dalia Romero, 59, told the Reuters news agency in Maracaibo, a city in northwestern Venezuela.
“I stayed here alone with breast cancer so that she could work there and send me money for treatment,” she said through tears. “Now I know that I’m going to die alone without seeing her again.”
Ender Nunez, a 42-year-old driver in Maracaibo, also expressed disappointment. “We’re going to be in this nightmare for six more years and what hurts the most is that they robbed us,” he said.
Emergency meeting requested
Meanwhile, nine Latin American countries have called for an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) permanent council due to their concerns over the election results.
Panama, one of the countries, also said it would be putting its diplomatic relations with Venezuela “on hold” and would withdraw diplomatic staff from the country until a full review is conducted.
“We are putting diplomatic relations on hold until a complete review of the voting records and of the voting computer system is carried out,” Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino said during a news conference.
Al Jazeera’s Bo explained that the call for an OAS meeting was unsurprising, as the governments involved are largely “right-wing governments [that] have traditionally opposed Venezuela”.
Instead, she said “all eyes right now are on what left-wing or centre-left-wing governments in the region will say” about the results.
On Monday morning, the government of left-wing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for the “impartial verification” of the results.
Gabriel Boric, the left-wing president of Chile, said his government would “not recognise any result that is not verifiable”, urging Venezuela to provide “total transparency of the election records and the process”.
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