Maduro claims victory amid allegations and threats of "bloodbath"

Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, was re-elected as president, announced the National Electoral Council. Maduro will serve a third consecutive six-year term. Both pre-election and exit polls indicated a victory for the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez.

The opposition claims that there were many irregularities during the voting.

After counting 80 percent of the votes, the longtime party leader secured over 51 percent, defeating the Democratic Unity Platform (PUD) candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, who received 44 percent.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado announced on Monday that the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez obtained 70 percent of the votes in Sunday’s presidential elections.

Venezuelan state media repeated President Nicolas Maduro's warnings hundreds of times. Speaking at a rally before the presidential elections on Tuesday, July 16, he threatened that if he was not re-elected as head of state, "Venezuela would inevitably face a bloodbath."

"Only my re-election can prevent civil war... The fate of Venezuela in the 21st century depends on our re-election victory," warned Maduro. The Venezuelan dictator, in his speech at a rally in La Vega, a western district of the capital Caracas, warned his compatriots, "If you don't want the country to plunge into a sea of blood, in a fratricidal war caused by fascists, we must ensure the greatest success, the greatest victory in the history of elections, in the history of our nation!"

Maduro will serve a third consecutive six-year term, representing the continuity of "chavismo" in power, which began in 1999 under former President Hugo Chávez. Maduro has been in power since Chávez’s death in 2013.

As CNN describes, in the capital Caracas, opposition supporters cried and hugged each other after the results were announced.

"Voters had turned out in droves, with many saying they would leave the country if Maduro won — pointing to violent repression and economic collapse under his rule," reports CNN.

Earlier on Sunday evening, opposition leaders claimed that there were irregularities in the elections, among them, opposition witnesses were denied entry to the National Electoral Council headquarters during the vote counting.

"They are losers," said Nicolas Maduro on Sunday, the day of the presidential elections. He spoke scornfully about former Latin American presidents, whom he prevented from arriving for Sunday's vote as observers.

The former presidents were invited to the elections by the Venezuelan opposition.

Maduro mocked the former presidents of Costa Rica, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, and Panama, Mireya Moscoso, as well as several other Latin American politicians, in an interview with Venezuelan media. "This was supposed to be a show of bankrupt traitors of their homelands and bastards of the empire, i.e., the United States," assessed the Venezuelan leader.

The politicians invited to the vote, including the former vice president of Colombia, Marta Lucia Ramirez, condemned Maduro's actions. His intervention caused the plane that was supposed to fly them from Panama to Venezuela not to receive permission to take off.

As a result of this intervention, delegations of parliamentarians from Spain could not reach Venezuela, noted the Spanish agency EFE.

Source: PAP / CNN