CARACAS: Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado called Sunday for a boycott of 2025 parliamentary elections after last year’s presidential vote widely considered to have been stolen by Nicolas Maduro.
Much of the international community disputes Maduro’s claim to victory in July 28 elections the opposition says it can prove were won by its candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.
“Going to vote again and again without respecting the results is not defending the (right to) vote, it is distorting the popular will,” Machado, who is in hiding, said in a video published on social media.
Venezuela is set to go to the polls this year to elect members of parliament, governors and mayors. No date has been set.
This comes as the United States, European Union, G7 and several democratic neighbors have refused to recognize Maduro’s claim to have won re-election to a third six-year term in last year’s vote.
The 62-year-old was sworn in on January 10 even as Washington offered a $25 million reward for Maduro’s arrest and sanctions were increased.
The opposition says its tally of results from the July vote showed a clear victory for 75-year-old Gonzalez Urrutia, who went into exile in Spain in September after a crackdown on dissent.
In 2020, the opposition boycotted parliamentary elections, having won a majority in the legislature five years earlier.
Maduro’s allies regained control of parliament and passed increasingly oppressive laws since then, according to rights groups.
The opposition had also boycotted 2018 presidential elections in which Maduro claimed re-election to a second term that was also rejected by most of the international community.
Venezuelan opposition chief urges parliamentary election boycott
https://arab.news/4m65t
Venezuelan opposition chief urges parliamentary election boycott
US lawmaker Fine criticized by rights advocates, Democrats after anti-Muslim remarks
- Fine’s past comments include calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the US, labeling of Muslims as “terrorists” and the mocking of the starvation and killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among others
WASHINGTON: Rights advocates and multiple Democrats on Tuesday condemned anti-Muslim comments by Republican US Representative Randy Fine who said on Sunday that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
Fine, whose comments against Muslims have often sparked outrage, has dismissed the criticism and since doubled down on his remarks on social media. The Council on American-Islamic Relations designated the Republican US lawmaker from Florida as an anti-Muslim extremist last year.
“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” Fine said on X on Sunday in a post that had over 40 million views as of Tuesday afternoon.
Some high-profile Democrats including California Governor Gavin Newsom called for him to resign while House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Fine an “Islamophobic, disgusting and unrepentant bigot.”
Jeffries also called for Republicans — who hold a majority in both chambers of Congress — to hold Fine accountable.
“To ignore this is to accept and normalize it,” Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. Fine’s past comments include calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the US, labeling of Muslims as “terrorists” and the mocking of the starvation and killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among others. Rights advocates have noted a rise in Islamophobia in the US in recent years due to a range of factors including hard-line immigration policies and white-supremacist rhetoric, as well as the fallout of Israel’s war in Gaza on American society.
