Venezuela’s election live updates: Maduro faces serious electoral challenge for first time in years

Opposition candidate  Edmundo González Urrutia was swarmed by reporters who blocked cheering voters from seeing him as he arrived at his church-adjacent voting center in Caracas.

Venezuela’s government is facing its toughest electoral test in decades. Sunday’s presidential election could give President Nicolas Maduro another six years in power, or end the self-described socialist policies that once successfully boosted anti-poverty programs but whose sustained mismanagement later pushed the country into an ongoing economic crisis.

For years, opposition politicians boycotted elections they saw as rigged, but as the government’s popularity has ebbed former rivals have banded together in an attempt to change the government at the ballot box.

What to know:

• Who is the opposition candidate? Edmundo González Urrutia, a former ambassador who’s never held public office. He has been campaigning with María Corina Machado, a former lawmaker who was banned from being the opposition candidate. They have promised an economy that will lure back the millions of Venezuelans who have left the country.
• Why is the current president having trouble? President Nicolás Maduro’s popularity has dwindled due to an economic crisis that resulted from a drop in oil prices, corruption and government mismanagement.
• Who will vote? More than 21 million Venezuelans are registered to vote, but the exodus of over 7.7 million people due to the prolonged crisis — including about 4 million voters — is expected to reduce the number of potential voters to about 17 million.
• Medicine shortages motivate Venezuelans to vote for opposition: Judy Oropeza says when her sister died in 2019 she vowed never again to vote for the government that long employed her as a school teacher.
• Polls are expected to start closing at 6 p.m., but it’s unclear when results will be announced by national electoral authorities. They typically don’t release partial results nor tendencies.
• Intimidation at checkpoints: At a low-income neighborhood in downtown Caracas, a street leading to two voting centers was cordoned off right where a ruling party-checkpoint was set-up. These government checkpoints are a well-documented control tactic used in previous elections.
• Military checkpoints have proliferated across Venezuela in the runup to the election as a form of intimidation for the opposition, but the rank-and-file are not unquestioning in their support of the president.
• Calls for a liberated Venezuela: Members of the country’s political opposition shout it with tears in their eyes, or red angry faces, or with hopeful ear-to-ear smiles. They shout it with Venezuelan flags in their hands or holding their children. They shout it sporting a soccer jersey or wearing a political party’s T-shirt.
• Chavez : Authorities set Sunday’s election to coincide with what would have been the 70th birthday of the former president—one last effort by the ruling socialist party to gain an edge in the hard fought electoral battle.
• Maduro is accused of locking up critics and harassing the opposition in a climate of rising authoritarianism.
  
  
  

AP