Elvis Amoroso, a pro-government official who notably declared the main opposition leaders ineligible, was named Friday president of the National Electoral Commission (CNE) of Venezuela responsible for organizing the 2024 presidential election, raising criticism from the opposition. .
“I want to inform the Venezuelan people that the rector Elvis Amoroso has been appointed president of the electoral authority,” he himself announced in a statement to the press.
The members of the CNE steering committee were appointed Thursday by the pro-power parliament, which has a large majority. Three of its 5 members are pro-power and two pro-opposition.
Mr. Amoroso, 60, has been on the list of people sanctioned by the United States since 2017 in the context of the Venezuelan political crisis (ban on traveling to the USA, freezing of any accounts or assets in the USA, etc.) .
The opposition is already very critical. Maria Corina Machado, declared ineligible by Amoroso, but favorite in the opposition primaries, declared at a conference on Friday that the CNE is an “instrument of the system, of the regime”.
“Confronting the maneuvers or pretensions of a CNE delivered to the system will be one of the many hurdles that we will have to overcome, but now we know very clearly who they are,” Ms. Machado added.
President Nicolas Maduro, who will run for a third term, welcomed Thursday: the new CNE “is made up of quality, professional and balanced men and women”.
“The new CNE is apparently diverse and varied, but in reality it is more likely to maintain the current system of power,” political scientist Daniel Varnagy said on Thursday.
The presidential election, the date of which remains to be fixed, must take place in 2024 and gubernatorial and municipal elections are scheduled for 2025.
In mid-June, the pro-power members of the former CNE had resigned, officially to allow the appointment of a new “consensual” CNE.
The former committee was appointed in 2021 after allegations of fraud in the 2020 legislative and 2018 presidential elections.
The opposition had boycotted these two elections and part of the international community had not recognized Maduro’s re-election.
The opposition, which has accepted the candidacies of several ineligible candidates for its primary in October, hopes to have these ineligibility lifted.
The ineligibilities were one of the main points on the agenda of the negotiations in Mexico – between power and opposition – but these have been frozen for months.
08/26/2023 04:42:43 – Caracas (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
