President Nicolas Maduro is set to appear before Venezuela’s Supreme Court on Friday, as he asks the top judicial body to affirm his disputed reelection.
The nation has been in political crisis since election authorities declared Maduro the winner of the July 28 vote, a decision questioned by the opposition and much of the international community.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) has yet to release detailed results from the polls, while the opposition has launched a website with copies of 84 percent of ballots cast, showing an easy win for their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. The government says those results are forged.
The Supreme Court — widely seen as aligned with Maduro — has summoned all presidential candidates before it, though some of the opposition have refused to attend out of fears for their safety.
Protests sparked last week by the declaration of Maduro’s victory left at least 24 people dead, according to rights groups, with thousands also arrested.
“We want peace, tranquility, that is why I filed this contentious appeal before the Supreme Court. There have been two days of hearings, all candidates and all parties were summoned… It’s my turn,” Maduro said Thursday at a rally in Caracas.
Critics say the court, and the electoral authority, are consistently loyal to Maduro, who wants the body to simply “validate” his victory.
Fellow left-wing governments from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico praised the verification process undertaken by the court but said that they “start from the premise that the CNE is the organ legally mandated to transparently disclose the electoral results.”
The CNE ratified Maduro’s victory with 52 percent of votes. In addition to not publishing detailed results, it has also claimed to have been hacked.
Jennie Lincoln, head of the Carter Center delegation that was invited to monitor the Venezuelan election, told AFP that it had “no evidence” of a cyberattack.
Furthering his post-election crackdown on Thursday, Maduro suspended access to the social media site X as he faced continued international pressure.
The president announced his government was blocking the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for 10 days, while accusing the site’s owner Elon Musk of “inciting hate and fascism” in Venezuela.
Maduro has overseen a national collapse, including an 80 percent drop in the once-wealthy oil-rich country’s GDP, amid domestic economic mismanagement and international sanctions.
According to the United Nations, more than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country of 30 million since Maduro took over in 2013, mostly to other Latin American countries and the United States.
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