CARACAS, Venezuela: The future of Venezuela is on the line. Voters will decide Sunday whether to reelect President Nicolas Maduro, whose 11 years in office have been beset by crisis, or allow the opposition a chance to deliver on a promise to undo the ruling party’s policies that caused economic collapse and forced millions to emigrate.
Historically fractured opposition parties have coalesced behind a single candidate, giving the United Socialist Party of Venezuela its most serious electoral challenge in a presidential election in decades.
Maduro is being challenged by former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, who represents the resurgent opposition, and eight other candidates. Supporters of Maduro and Gonzalez marked the end of the official campaign season Thursday with massive demonstrations in the capital, Caracas.

Here are some reasons why the election matters to the world:
Migration impact

The election will impact migration flows regardless of the winner.
The instability in Venezuela for the past decade has pushed more than 7.7 million people to migrate, which the UN’s refugee agency describes as the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history. Most Venezuelan migrants have settled in Latin America and the Caribbean, but they are increasingly setting their sights on the US.
A nationwide poll conducted in April by the Venezuela-based research firm Delphos indicated that about a quarter of the people in Venezuela were thinking about emigrating if Maduro wins again. Of those, about 47 percent said a win by the opposition would make them stay, but roughly the same amount indicated that an improved economy would keep them in their home country. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The main opposition leader is not on the ballot

The most talked-about name in the race is not on the ballot: María Corina Machado. The former lawmaker emerged as an opposition star in 2023, filling the void left when a previous generation of opposition leaders fled into exile. Her principled attacks on government corruption and mismanagement rallied millions of Venezuelans to vote for her in the opposition’s October primary.

But Maduro’s government declared the primary illegal and opened criminal investigations against some of its organizers. Since then, it has issued warrants for several of Machado’s supporters and arrested some members of her staff, and the country’s top court affirmed a decision to keep her off the ballot.
Yet, she kept on campaigning, holding rallies nationwide and turning the ban on her candidacy into a symbol of the loss of rights and humiliations that many voters have felt for over a decade.
She has thrown her support behind Edmundo González Urrutia, a former ambassador who has never held public office, helping a fractious opposition unify.
They are campaigning together on the promise of economic reform that will lure back the millions of people who have migrated since Maduro became president in 2013.
González began his diplomatic career as an aide to Venezuela’s ambassador in the US in the late 1970s. He was posted to Belgium and El Salvador, and served as Caracas’ ambassador to Algeria. His last post was as ambassador to Argentina during Hugo Chávez’s presidency, which began in 1999.
Why is the current president struggling?
Maduro’s popularity has dwindled due to an economic crisis caused by a drop in oil prices, corruption and government mismanagement.
Maduro can still bank on a cadre of die-hard believers, known as Chavistas, including millions of public employees and others whose businesses or employment depend on the state. But the ability of his party to use access to social programs to make people vote has diminished as the economy has frayed.
He is the heir to Hugo Chávez, a popular socialist who expanded Venezuela’s welfare state while locking horns with the United States.
Sick with cancer, Chávez handpicked Maduro to act as interim president upon his death. He took on the role in March 2013, and the following month, he narrowly won the presidential election triggered by his mentor’s death.
Maduro was reelected in 2018, in a contest that was widely considered a sham. His government banned Venezuela’s most popular opposition parties and politicians from participating and, lacking a level playing field, the opposition urged voters to boycott the election.
That authoritarian tilt was part of the rationale the US used to impose economic sanctions that crippled the country’s crucial oil industry.
Mismanaged oil industry
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves, but its production declined over several years, in part because of government mismanagement and widespread corruption in the state-owned oil company.
In April, Venezuela’s government announced the arrest of Tareck El Aissami, the once-powerful oil minister and a Maduro ally, over an alleged scheme through which hundreds of millions of dollars in oil proceeds seemingly disappeared.
That same month, the US government reimposed sanctions on Venezuela’s energy sector, after Maduro and his allies used the ruling party’s total control over Venezuela’s institutions to undermine an agreement to allow free elections. Among those actions, they blocked Machado from registering as a presidential candidate and arrested and persecuted members of her team.
The sanctions make it illegal for US companies to do business with state-run Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., better known as PDVSA, without prior authorization from the US Treasury Department. The outcome of the election could decide whether those sanctions remain in place.
An uneven playing field
A more free and fair presidential election seemed like a possibility last year, when Maduro’s government agreed to work with the US-backed Unitary Platform coalition to improve electoral conditions in October 2023. An accord on election conditions earned Maduro’s government broad relief from the US economic sanctions on its state-run oil, gas and mining sectors.
But days later, authorities branded the opposition’s primary illegal and began issuing warrants and arresting human rights defenders, journalists and opposition members.
A UN-backed panel investigating human rights violations in Venezuela has reported that the government has increased repression of critics and opponents ahead of the election, subjecting targets to detention, surveillance, threats, defamatory campaigns and arbitrary criminal proceedings.
The government has also used its control of media outlets, the country’s fuel supply, electric network and other infrastructure to limit the reach of the Machado-González campaign.
The mounting actions taken against the opposition prompted the Biden administration earlier this year to end the sanctions relief it granted in October.
 

RIO DE JANEIRO: G20 financial leaders said on Friday the global economy was likely heading for a “soft landing,” but warned wars and escalating conflicts could endanger this outlook, while more global cooperation could make growth stronger.
In a joint communique after a two-day meeting in Brazil, finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 major economies also committed to resist protectionism in trade and stressed the need to reduce economic inequalities.
Last month, the World Bank forecast that the global economy would avoid a third consecutive decline in growth since a major post-pandemic jump in 2021, with 2024 growth stabilising at 2.6 percent, in line with 2023, but warned that overall output would remain well below pre-pandemic levels through 2026.
“We are encouraged by the increasing likelihood of a soft landing of the global economy, although multiple challenges remain,” the communique said. “Downside risks include wars and escalating conflicts,” it said.
By avoiding explicit mention of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, diplomats have worked to sidestep the disagreements between Russia and major Western nations that derailed a consensus at the finance chiefs’ gathering in February.
To defuse the disagreement, Brazil drafted a chair statement on geopolitical issues, stressing that these matters will be addressed by G20 leaders in November.
“The G20 made a wise decision to put geopolitical issues in their place to allow the cooperation agenda to move forward,” Brazil Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told a news conference.
Haddad also hailed the group’s first-ever declaration calling for cooperation to effectively tax the world’s largest fortunes, although that separate joint statement papered over disagreements about the right forum to advance the agenda.
The G20 communique said economic activity had proved to be more resilient than expected in many parts of the world, but the recovery had been highly uneven across countries, contributing to the risk of economic divergence.

Balance of risks
The document flagged risks to the economic outlook that remain broadly balanced, with more economic cooperation, faster-than-expected disinflation and technological innovations, like the safe development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cited among upside risks.
But at the same AI tech could also turn out to be a downside risk to growth, the document said, along with economic fragmentation and persistent inflation keeping interest rates higher for longer, extreme weather events, and excessive debt.
Climate change and significant loss of biodiversity were key topics of concern, the G20 financial leaders agreed, warning that if poorer nations had to shoulder more of the cost of fighting climate change, it would make global inequality worse.
“We reiterate the understanding that the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action,” the communique said.
The document also stepped-up language calling for a reform of the International Monetary Fund, that would give emerging and developing economies a bigger say in the lender of last resort.
The G20 communique underlined the “urgency and importance of realignment in quota shares to better reflect members’ relative positions in the world economy.” G20