(Paris) The regional and municipal elections scheduled in Venezuela for November 21 will be “neither free nor democratic,” Colombian President Ivan Duque said on Monday, seeing in the ballot a maneuver by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to maintain “his dictatorship” .
The elections “will not be free, will not be democratic. It is the strategy of always Maduro: to break the opposition, to invite it to take part in elections, to let it gain four, five or six regions to be able to pass for a democrat in the eyes of the world and to maintain its dictatorship, a he declared in an interview with AFP in Paris.
Very strained relations
Colombia and Venezuela have very tense relations. The border between these two countries has been almost completely closed since 2015 and Caracas severed diplomatic relations in 2019 with Bogota after the recognition by Colombia, as well as about fifty other countries, including the United States, of Juan Guaidó in as interim president.
The electoral campaign for the regional and municipal ballot on November 21 in Venezuela opened on October 28. Elections which will be monitored by several international bodies, such as the UN and an electoral mission of the European Union, the first in fifteen years in this country.
Venezuela has often been reluctant to welcome electoral observers and the EU had unsuccessfully requested the presence of a mission for the legislative elections of December 2020. This election had been boycotted by the opposition and the government had won an overwhelming victory .
The government of President Nicolas Maduro, which would like a lifting of the international economic sanctions imposed on his country, has been engaged since August in a dialogue with the opposition.
For their part, the main opposition parties broke with their boycott strategy of recent years, during the 2018 presidential election and the 2020 legislative elections.
Ivan Duque also praised the convergence of views with Emmanuel Macron on the Venezuelan question. “We worked hand in hand, not only to denounce Nicolas Majuro before the International Criminal Court, but also to regenerate democracy in Venezuela, to be able to strengthen citizens and see free elections,” he declared for a few hours after a working lunch with the French president.
The ICC prosecutor’s office in 2018 opened a preliminary investigation into alleged human rights abuses by the Maduro government, notably due to the violent crackdown on anti-government protests in 2017 in which nearly 100 people died .
Nicolas Maduro received the ICC prosecutor on Monday, visiting his country.