(Caracas) Venezuelan opponents who wanted to organize a recall referendum against President Nicolas Maduro announced on Saturday that they would give up collecting the necessary signatures, deeming the conditions imposed by the National Electoral Council (CNE) “unrealizable”.
Posted at 12:59 p.m.
On Friday, the CNE announced that it had authorized the opening for 12 p.m. Wednesday of 1,200 signature collection centers, the bar of 4.2 million signatures having to be exceeded to stimulate the referendum (20% of the 20.9 million registered voters in this country of 30 million people).
“We consider it really pointless to waste time waiting in line […]. We cannot act in a reckless and irresponsible way and throw people into queues that will not produce the expected result: the calling of the referendum”, declared on Saturday one of the opposition leaders César Perez Vivas, member of the Venezuelan Movement for revocation (Mover).
The Mover (pun on moving, editor’s note) is made up of half a dozen small political organizations.
“We don’t give up […] and we will use all national and international authorities” to organize the recall referendum, added Nicmer Evans, another member of the Mover.
“Five voters should be processed per minute, for 12 hours, in every machine in the country, with no margin for error […] It is impossible”, had estimated the day before Roberto Picon, one of the two rectors of the opposition within the CNE, who had not approved the conditions imposed to bring together the signatures enacted by the Council.
The Venezuelan opposition has already tried unsuccessfully in 2016 to demand a recall referendum against the first term of Nicolas Maduro (2013-2019).
He was re-elected in 2018 in a ballot described as “fraud” by his opponents and rejected by the United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries. Opponent Juan Guaidó had declared himself the country’s interim president, but he failed to oust Maduro from power.
The next presidential elections are scheduled for 2024.