Venezuela gripped by challenges after 777 casino 8k8election

Venezuela keeps facing domestic and outside challenges after incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro was declared winner in presidential contest and won a third term starting next year.

Protests broke out across Venezuela on July 29, with police and protesters clashing on the streets of Caracas and elsewhere in the country, a day after incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro, was declared winner in a high-stakes election.

Tensions started to rise after Maduro was declared the winner in the early hours of July 29. Opposition parties said their own count showed a clear victory for Edmundo Gonzalez.

Venezuelans voted on July 28 in a hotly-contested presidential election. The leading candidates were Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, and retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez, who represented the Democratic Unity Platform, a coalition of parties. He was chosen in April to replace Maria Corina Machado, a conservative former lawmaker who was blocked from running in any election for 15 years by Venezuela's Supreme Tribunal of Justice.

Protesters and opposition parties say the results are not accurate, and leaders from some countries in the Americas also questioned the outcome. On July 29, Maduro's government said it was suspending diplomatic relations with Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, Dominican Republic and Uruguay. Leaders from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico all called for transparency.

The Organization of American States (OAS) said its permanent council would be meeting on July 31 to discuss the Venezuela situation.

Venezuela's National Electoral Council (CNE) said Maduro had secured 51.2 percent of the vote, ahead of Gonzalez who received 44.2 percent. Alvis Amoroso, the head of the CNE, announced that some 9 million people had voted, out of 17 million who were eligible.

Venezuela typically does two counts of votes, one of electronic results sent to the CNE and another of paper tallies at individual polling stations that record votes at each voting machine. The paper tallies in many polling stations were said not released on time.

Opposition parties and observers have said that, without those tallies, it would be impossible to verify the results. Maduro accused the opposition leaders of hacking electoral systems.

Maduro is the hand-picked successor of Hugo Chavez, a populist former president who died in 2013. Their United Socialist Party has been in power for a quarter of a century. If the results hold, Maduro's next six-year term starts in 2025.

He went into the election trailing in opinion polls, with opposition parties blaming him for an economic contraction. In statements after the election results were announced, Maduro celebrated his victory and said the election marked a "triumph of peace and stability".

There were eight other candidates on the ballot but only Gonzalez posed any real challenge to Maduro.

Still, the reactions were mixed, and tension built through the day.

"You can imagine there's a lot of confusion, sadness, and total silence. That's the atmosphere," said Norely Rivas, a homemaker in Caracas.

"Around noon, videos started coming in from people, and yes, there were pot-banging protests in many areas of Caracas after a long silence in the morning because most people were deeply affected by the results," she said.

Maduro took power in 2013 after the death of Chavez. He has said that he "plans to advance the diversification of the economy away from oil dependence, promote small and medium-sized enterprises and maintain state control over strategic resources," Vielma noted.

Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world and was once one of the continent's richest economies, but under heavy sanctions by the United States, falling oil prices and hyperinflation — which topped out at 130,000 percent in 2018 but has since fallen to about 50 percent per year — have taken their toll.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.