Huge show of opposition in Venezuela poll
Further protests planned in anti-Maduro move
VENEZUELA’S opposition vowed yesterday to escalate protests after a massive vote against President Nicolas Maduro in an unofficial plebiscite the government mocked as a fraud.
After months of demonstrations that have led to nearly 100 deaths, the Democratic Unity coalition said it brought 7.2 million people out on Sunday for an informal referendum intended to delegitimise a leader they call a dictator.
“We’re going to be on the streets every day, the whole country is going to rise, it’s the start of zero hour,” opposition legislator Tomas Guanipa said, ahead of an official announcement of tactics by the opposition coalition.
Maduro’s foes are demanding a general election and want to stop his plan to create a controversial new legislative super-body called a Constituent Assembly in a July 30 vote.
Opposition strategy may include lengthy road blockades and sit-ins, a national strike, or possibly a march on the Miraflores presidential palace, similar to events before a short-lived coup against Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Julio Borges, who leads the opposition-controlled legislature, said shortly after midnight when the referendum results were announced: “We don’t want a fraudulent Constituent Assembly imposed on us. We don’t want to be Cuba.
“We don’t want to be a country without freedom.”
On three questions at Sunday’s event, opposition supporters voted overwhelmingly – by 98% – to reject the proposed new assembly, urge the military to defend the existing constitution, and support elections before Maduro’s term ends, according to academics monitoring the vote for the opposition.
Sunday’s nearly 7.2 million participation compared with 7.7 million opposition votes in the 2015 legislative elections that it won by a landslide, and 7.3 million votes for the opposition in a 2013 presidential poll narrowly won by Maduro.
Opposition organisers said the turnout followed just two weeks of organisation, with voting at just 2 000 polling stations, compared with 14 000 for the 2015 vote. Maduro, 54, a former bus driver and long-serving foreign minister for Chavez, narrowly won the election in 2013 and his ratings have plunged to just over 20% during a brutal economic crisis.
Though polls show the opposition has majority support and his foes repeatedly call for a free and fair election, Maduro insists they are US pawns intent on sabotaging the economy and bringing him down through violence.
Most Venezuelans oppose the Constituent Assembly, which will have power to rewrite the constitution and annul the opposition-led legislature. Maduro, whose term is due to end in early 2019, dismissed Sunday’s event as an internal exercise by the opposition with no bearing on his government.
His allies accused the opposition of inflating numbers with multiple voting and false registrations.
The latest fatality in the political turmoil came on Sunday, when gunmen shot a 61-year-old woman in a crowd of opposition voters in the poor Caracas neighbourhood of Catia.