Edmundo González Urrutia, leader of the Plataforma Unitaria Democrática, was the runner up with 44.02%
My buddy's new girlfriend is kind but a lib and her family made it to the states from Central America (from less fortunate circumstances). She was telling me about this and about her close friend from law school, who is Venezuelan and who got shunted to OKC or Tulsa or somewhere less sexy, and whose family were, like, once oil executives before Maduro came and they fled to America. "A riches to rags story, but she's going to be okay", she tells me, of her friend, and I'm biting my tongue but just want to say, hey, you know, my family never even used to be oil executives! Save your pity for us, pls!
My initial feeling is these results confirm my take that this was absolutely a winnable election for the opposition. The desire for fresh leadership is widespread enough, and hardships caused by U.S. economic warfare have created ripe conditions for opposing parties to seize advantage of.
Luckily for Maduro the counter-revolution is incapable of rallying around the sort of candidate who could win. A SocDem who claims they'll preserve broadly popular social programs but eliminate their "corruption", talks about standing up for human rights, and seeks to normalize relations with the U.S (but who is not ready to coup the Venezuelan government for Uncle Sam if given the slightest chance to) would have a great chance of winning. This is so obvious that even the ghouls in Washington backed Guaido because he was opposition figure closest to meeting these criteria, except of course that of not being a spineless traitor.
María Corina Machado the leader of the counter-revolution, is not that. She proudly identifies as being on the extreme right of Venezuelan political spectrum, with her central policies being to privatize the state-owned oil company (PDVSA) and eliminate welfare for the poor. She has also supported every effort by a foreign government to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
The Venezuelan counter-revolution also continues to be very clearly overtly racist against Afro-Venezuelan and Mestizo peoples, in their rhetoric and aims.
Of course no mainstream media in the Global North will examine the very clear reasons for the Venezuelan counter-revolution's incredible streak of L's continued today, and will instead peddle Mike Lindell tier conspiracy theories.
this is great!!! ready for libs everywhere to call it a rigged election tho
"If it was truly rigged wouldn't he have won by more than 51%?"
"..."
Western leaders love to praise Paul Kagame's dictatorship in Rwanda despite Kagame winning 90%+ of the vote in obviously rigged elections. The difference is that Kagame helps the west steal the DRC's resources, while Maduro and the PSUV refuse to hand over Venezuela's resources and state companies to the west.
That's a nifty take on the flag. The stars look kind of like shooting stars-- very dynamic, I could see it being a brandable design.
I know the election results are legit because Antony Blinken says they aren't.
"Golpe de estado" is already trending on Twitter, here we go.
Looks like Telesur accidentally showed the 4.6% "other" result as every third party getting 4.6% each, so dumbasses think that means there was fraud instead of a simple graphic error.
4.6% is all the votes of the other candidates besides Gonzalez.
Some people pointed that out. That the system is doing this since these guys git between 0.5% to 1.2%
What would have happened if Maduro got the most votes but less than 50%?
Venezuelan presidential elections follow the plurality rule, meaning whoever gets the most votes wins outright and there are no runoffs.