Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called on the opposition to seek a truly legal and constitutional path and to break its ties with dependence on US imperialism.
«I hope that no candidate is going to withdraw because the screws are tightened from Washington or because the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, calls him to threaten him,» the president declared during his Monday night programme Con Maduro +.
The president said he expects them to remain loyal to their country and seek out their voters, because «there are voters for everyone» and asserted that whoever wins «a governorship has won and whoever is elected deputy is welcome».
He assured that they will have a stronger and livelier National Assembly (parliament), «and imagine all those people inside the legislative body, they are provoking people to run for office», he said with laughter.
The president of the Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, commented that despite the turnout figures revealed the day before by the National Electoral Council (CNE), victory cannot yet be claimed because «sometimes there is great brazenness in some of the political actors of the opposition in Venezuela».
He pointed out that when they participate, they always do so only to claim fraud in case they lose the elections.
Rodríguez assured that the forces of the Gran Polo Patriótico Simón Bolívar (Gppsb) are preparing to achieve a great victory on 25 May, and said that «hopefully they have really learned from the many mistakes they made in the past».
He said that it is now perfectly clear that they have a position on the Venezuelan electoral system, because «nobody is masochistic about submitting to a particular electoral system if they do not trust it or the results».
«They are endorsing, as did the more than six thousand candidates who put their names on the ballot, that the (Venezuelan) electoral system is transparent and the most efficient in the world,» he remarked.
The day before, the CNE, through a communiqué, highlighted the plural and democratic participation for the regional elections in May, in which 54 political organisations will participate and 36,986 nominations were received, corresponding to 6,687 candidates.
In this nomination process, 36 national political organisations, 10 regional ones, three national indigenous formations and three regional ones were registered for a total of 54, which presented candidates.
The vice-president of Organisation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Pedro Infante, stressed that this year they are going to territorialise the campaign – which begins on 29 April – and to this end they have begun the process of organising the five thousand 338 campaign commands in the communal circuits.
He explained that all the forces of the Great Historic Bloc, the Five Generations, the PSUV as the leading force, the Gppsb, the Missions and Great Missions, the Militias and all the organised forces of the Revolution in each of the territories will be integrated in a broad manner.
