Maduro secures third term amidst electoral controversy and threats

The National Electoral Council announced that Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's authoritarian leader, has been re-elected president. Maduro will serve a third consecutive six-year term despite pre-election and exit polls indicating a victory for the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez.

The opposition claims that there were many irregularities during the voting.

Having counted 80 percent of the votes, the longtime party leader secured over 51 percent, thus defeating the Democratic Unity Platform (PUD) candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who received 44 percent of the votes.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado announced on Monday that opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez obtained 70 percent of the votes in Sunday’s presidential elections.

Venezuelan state media echoed President Nicolás Maduro's warnings multiple times. Speaking at a rally before the presidential elections on Tuesday, 16 July, he threatened that if he were not re-elected as head of state, "Venezuela would inevitably face a bloodbath."

"Only my re-election can prevent civil war... The fate of Venezuela in the 21st century depends on our re-election victory," warned Maduro. The Venezuelan dictator, speaking at the rally in La Vega, a western district of the capital Caracas, cautioned his compatriots, "If you don't want the country to plunge into a sea of blood in a fratricidal war caused by fascists, we must ensure the greatest success, the greatest victory in the history of elections, in the history of our nation!"

Maduro will serve a third consecutive six-year term, continuing "chavismo" in power, which began in 1999 under former President Hugo Chávez. Maduro has been in power since Chávez died in 2013.

As CNN describes, opposition supporters cried and hugged each other in the capital, Caracas, after the results were announced.

Voters turned out in large numbers, many of them stating that they would leave the country if Maduro won - citing brutal repression and economic collapse under his rule, reported CNN.

Earlier on Sunday evening, opposition leaders claimed irregularities in the elections—among other things, opposition witnesses were denied entry to the National Electoral Council headquarters during the vote counting.

"They are losers," said the leader of the country Nicolás Maduro on Sunday, the day of the presidential elections in Venezuela, speaking scornfully about former Latin American presidents whom he prevented from arriving for Sunday's vote as observers.

The former presidents were invited to the elections by the Venezuelan opposition.

In an interview with Venezuelan media, Maduro mocked former presidents of Costa Rica, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, Panama, Mireya Moscoso, and several other Latin American politicians. This was supposed to be a show of bankrupt traitors of their homelands and bastards of the empire, i.e., the United States - assessed the Venezuelan leader.

The politicians invited to the vote, including the former vice president of Colombia, Marta Lucia Ramirez, condemned Maduro's actions. His intervention caused the plane that was supposed to fly them from Panama to Venezuela not to receive permission to take off.

The Spanish agency EFE noted that delegations of Spanish parliamentarians also could not reach Venezuela as a result of this intervention.