Venezuela sets election date after quelling opponents

Venezuela is to hold a presidential election on April 22, with President Nicolás Maduro the overwhelming favourite after sidelining his main opponents during nearly four years of increasingly authoritarian rule.

The electoral commission announced the date on Wednesday evening, five days after the ruling Socialist party confirmed Mr Maduro as its candidate and hours after talks between the government and the opposition in the Dominican Republic broke down.

“The people have decided already!” Mr Maduro crowed at a rally of his supporters shortly before the announcement was made. “Nicolás Maduro is president of the republic for the period from 2019 to 2025!”

The US and most major Latin American countries have already dismissed the forthcoming election as unfair and some say they will not recognise the results.

Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo López, the two best-known figures from the opposition, are ineligible to stand.

The former has been barred from office for alleged irregularities while he was a state governor and the latter is under house arrest, found guilty of inciting protesters during demonstrations against Mr Maduro in 2014. Other senior members of the opposition have been driven into exile and some political parties have been banned from the electoral process after boycotting municipal polls in December.

A few more moderate opposition leaders have said they will stand against Mr Maduro. They include “the two Henris” — veteran politicians Henri Falcón and Henri Ramos Allup — but many opponents regard them as lackeys of the Maduro regime who will only legitimise his rule if they run.

Mr Maduro has led Venezuela since April 2013 following the death of Hugo Chávez, his mentor and the father of the country’s leftwing revolution. Opinion polls show Mr Maduro with an approval rating of about 25 per cent after presiding over one of the biggest economic collapses in Latin American history.

Despite that, the government used its formidable propaganda machine and handouts of subsidised food to secure a number of significant electoral victories in 2017. 

In July it won a widely discredited vote for a bogus parliament, the Constituent Assembly, which is packed with government supporters. In October it defied expectations by trouncing the opposition in regional elections and in December it took more than 90 per cent of council seats in the municipal vote, which the opposition largely boycotted.

The two sides have been talking sporadically in the Dominican Republic in recent months but those discussions fizzled out on Wednesday. The opposition said the government refused to concede ground on the issue of freeing political prisoners and allowing humanitarian aid into Venezuela to feed its hungry people, while the government accused its opponents of sabotaging the talks on orders from Washington.

US secretary of state Rex Tillerson completed a week-long tour of Latin America this week in which “the Venezuelan tragedy”, as he described it, was a constant theme. He hinted the US might consider oil sanctions against Caracas, to add to the political and personal sanctions imposed last year.

That could cripple an economy which has already lost a third of its value in recent years and is forecast only to get worse. The IMF expects gross domestic product to contract a further 10 per cent in 2018 and inflation to hit 13,000 per cent. About 2m Venezuelans have left the country, saying it is increasingly impossible to make ends meet there.