CARACAS: Venezuelans, reeling under a devastating economic crisis, began voting Sunday in an election boycotted by the opposition and condemned by much of the international community but expected to hand deeply unpopular President Nicolas Maduro a new mandate.
Maduro, the political heir to the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez, has presided over an implosion of once wealthy oil producer Venezuela’s economy since taking office in 2013.
Hyperinflation, food and medicine shortages, rising crime and broken water, power and transportation networks have sparked growing discontent and violent unrest among Venezuelans.
However the 55-year-old former bus driver is expected to easily defeat his main rival Henri Falcon, a former army officer and state governor who has failed to gain the endorsement of the main opposition leaders, and an evangelical candidate, Javier Bertucci.
Wearing a bright red shirt that identifies him as a “Chavista,” the president arrived early at a Caracas polling station along with his wife Cilia Flores and trusted officials and claimed to be the first person to cast a ballot.
After voting, Maduro called the election a choice between “votes and ballots,” and pledged to respect “the will of the people.”
Maduro, who has a tight grip on the electoral and military authorities, faces a bitterly divided opposition which has called for a boycott.
“Low enthusiasm will likely reduce voter turnout and enable Maduro to control the outcome without major social backlash,” said analyst Risa Grais-Targow of Eurasia Group.
Teresa Paredes, 56-year-old housewife, said that “for the first time in my life I am not going to vote because we are living a dog’s life, without medicines, without food.”
Alvaro Toroa, 64-year-old retiree from the opposition stronghold of eastern Caracas, said he cast his ballot because “this has to be ended. Falcon is able to bring disaffected Chavistas and the opposition.”
Aware of the popular mood, Maduro on Saturday promised an “economic revolution” if re-elected, while Falcon promised to dollarize the economy, return companies expropriated by Chavez, and allow humanitarian aid, something the president rejects.
Some 20.5 million people are eligible to vote in a single-round election to choose a president for a six-year term that will begin in January 2019.
Presidential elections are traditionally held in December, but they were moved up this year by the country’s all-powerful and pro-government Constituent Assembly, catching the divided and weakened opposition off-guard.
The Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) opposition coalition, increasingly pinning its hopes for change on outside pressure forcing the socialists to remove Maduro, has won support from the United States, the European Union and 14 countries of the Lima Group who have called for the vote to be postponed.
Maduro is accused of undermining democracy, usurping the power of the opposition-dominated legislature by replacing it with his Constituent Assembly, and cracking down hard on the opposition. Protests in 2017, still fresh in the collective memory, left around 125 dead.
The MUD’s most popular leaders have been sidelined or detained, the boycott their only remaining weapon.
Washington has dismissed the vote as a “sham” to keep Maduro in power, and has slapped sanctions on Caracas in a push to isolate his regime.
Maduro pushed back after casting his ballot.
“Venezuela is a country at peace that deserves respect,” he told reporters. “To the world I say enough — end this ferocious campaign to twist our identity, our reality.”
With this election Venezuela “is on the path to a period of political stability.
“Your vote decides: ballots or bullets, motherland or colony, peace or violence, independence or subordination. Your vote decides, come out to vote,” Maduro said.
Despite holding the world’s largest oil reserves, the country faces ruin, with the IMF citing a drop of 45.0 percent in GDP since Maduro took over in 2013.
The crippled oil industry lacks investment and its assets are increasingly prey to debt settlements as the country defaults.
And worse, the US threatens an oil embargo on top of the sanctions that have hit Venezuela’s efforts to renegotiate its debt.
“The most likely scenario is greater international isolation and economic deterioration,” said Diego Moya-Ocampos of IHS Markit analysts.
“The key factors will be the economy and the army,” added US analyst Michael Shifter. “The country is a powder keg and something could provoke unrest that would be difficult to contain.”
At the Vatican, Pope Francis told thousands of Catholic faithful gathered for mass at Saint Peter’s square that he wanted to dedicate “a special remembrance to my dear Venezuela.”
He then asked that the Holy Spirit grant Venezuela’s “governors and people” the “wisdom to find the path toward peace and unity.”
He also prayed for the inmates who died in a Venezuela prison riot on Thursday.
Polls opened at 6 am (1000 GMT) and are scheduled to close at 6 p.m. (2200 GMT). Some 30,000 police and armed forces personnel were deployed to maintain security.
Venezuela’s Maduro eyes second term despite economic woes
Venezuela’s Maduro eyes second term despite economic woes
- Aware of the popular mood, Maduro Saturday promised an “economic revolution” if re-elected
- Maduro, with a tight grip on the electoral and military authorities, faces a bitterly divided opposition which has called for a boycott
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
