The political miracle occurred in the Daoíz and Velarde Barracks, in the Madrid neighborhood of Pacífico, an allegory about war and peace. The Venezuelan opposition met again after long months of battles, which ended in December with the incumbent presidency headed by Juan Guaidó. The first staging of a reconciliation in which very few believed.
“Thanks to teamwork we have managed to build this unitary effort,” Ramón López, from the centrist Primero Justicia (PJ), told EL MUNDO, after the Spanish chapter of the Democratic Unitary Platform was set up to a full house, whose first major objective is to bring the opposition primaries on October 22. His coordinator will be López himself.
Leaders of the PSOE, the PP and Ciudadanos accompanied the swearing in of the Platform, which has the participation of the parties that have faced each other in recent months, beginning with PJ, the social democratic Acción Democrática (AD) and the social Christian Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT). , together with Voluntad Popular (VP), the party created by Leopoldo López that has presented Guaidó as its standard bearer for the primaries. In addition, representatives of La Causa R, Copei and Encuentro Ciudadano also attended.
The attendance of VP was in doubt, but finally several leaders close to López attended, such as Estefanía Parra and Alfredo Jimeno, in addition to deputies Franco Casella and Ismael García. “It is a first step, we meet again with the primaries as a fundamental axis,” Jimeno acknowledged to this newspaper.
Together with them the president of the legitimate National Assembly, Dinorah Figuera; the vice president, Auristela Vásquez; the Chavista dissident José Gregorio Briceño and the activist Manuel Rodríguez, among others. Civil society was also present, led by the president-editor of the newspaper El Nacional, Miguel Henrique Otero.
“We have to meet in 2024 around the cause of defeating Maduro in the presidential elections. They are going to do everything to demoralize, demobilize and deactivate the vote. And we have to respond with intelligence. The call is to organize the cities of Spain to that they can vote. If Maduro takes away their right to vote in 2024, there will be a parallel registry for them to exercise their right to vote in the primaries,” explained deputy Luis Florido, international coordinator of the Platform, who arrived from Caracas for the Madrid act.
Of the 600,000 Venezuelans currently living in Spain, at least 350,000 have the right to vote, but only 22,000 are on the electoral register. “That’s why we want the registry to be opened,” López insisted.
Chavismo’s strategy, from day one, seeks that its emigrants do not vote, much more after the great diaspora that has spread throughout the world, more than 7.5 million people with nearly 4.5 million potential voters. The point is that only 130,000 are registered.
“We aspire for at least 150,000 voters to register in Spain for the primaries,” said Pedro Gil, emerging leader of the opposition and coordinator of the Platform for Venezuelans in the Basque Country.
The ambitious plan of the democratic opposition goes through the creation of a digital system to raise a registry parallel to that of the National Electoral Council (CNE). For the day of the primaries, with regulations involved, the Venezuelan society in each of the cities would organize the voting in the centers approved by the Unitary Platform.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
