Nicolás Maduro faces the toughest electoral contest of his decade in power

The self-proclaimed socialist government of Venezuela faces a serious electoral challenge in a presidential election for the first time in decades.

President Nicolas Maduro, now in his 11th year in office, is being challenged by former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, who leads a resurgent opposition, as well as eight other candidates. The official campaign period for the July 28 election began on Thursday.

Maduro, who has presided over an economic collapse that has caused millions of people to emigrate, and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela have evaded challenges by excluding rivals from elections and accusing them of being elitists out of touch with majorities and allied with foreign powers.

This time he promised to allow the opposition coalition Unitary Platform to participate in the elections, in a deal that gave his government some relief from crippling economic sanctions imposed by the United States. That respite was short-lived, however, as Washington reimposed sanctions in the wake of escalating government measures against the opposition, including blocking the candidacy of influential opposition figure María Corina Machado.

Below we provide details on the upcoming presidential elections in Venezuela.

Who is the opposition candidate?

The biggest name in the race isn’t on the ballot: Maria Corina Machado, a former lawmaker, became a star of the opposition in 2023, filling the void left when an older generation of opposition leaders went into exile. Her attacks on corruption and government mismanagement mobilized millions of Venezuelans to vote for her in the October opposition primary.

But Maduro’s government declared the primaries illegal and opened criminal investigations against some of its organizers. It has since issued warrants against several Machado supporters and arrested some of her staff, and the country’s highest court upheld the decision to keep her off the ballot.

Yet she continued to campaign, holding rallies across the country and turning the ban on her candidacy into a symbol of the disenfranchisement and humiliation many voters have felt for more than a decade.

Machado has thrown his support behind Edmundo González Urrutia — a former ambassador who has never held public office — helping a fractious opposition unite behind him.

They are campaigning together, promising an economy that will attract the millions of Venezuelans who have emigrated since Maduro took office in 2013.

On Thursday, the bus that was to transport Machado and Gonzalez through a section of Caracas was temporarily stopped by police while the two candidates were standing on a platform attached to the vehicle. The officers claimed the stop was a routine procedure to verify the validity of the driver’s documents.

People gathered at the opposition march to commemorate the official start of the campaign chanted “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” and “It’s going to fall, and it’s going to fall, this government is going to fallr”. They waved Venezuelan flags as they awaited the arrival of the two opponents, and motorists accompanied them with their car horns.

Gonzalez began his diplomatic career as an assistant to Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States in the late 1970s. He held posts in Belgium and El Salvador and was Caracas’ ambassador to Algeria. His last post was ambassador to Argentina during the early years of Hugo Chavez’s presidency, which began in 1999.

More recently, González was an international relations consultant and wrote a historical work on Venezuela during World War II.

Why is the current president in trouble?

President Nicolás Maduro’s popularity has waned due to an economic crisis resulting from falling oil prices, corruption and government mismanagement.

Maduro can still count on a group of die-hard believers, known as “Chavistas,” that includes millions of public servants and others whose businesses or jobs depend on the state. But the ability of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela to use access to social programs to get voters to the polls has diminished as the country’s economy has frayed.

He is the heir to Hugo Chávez, a popular socialist who expanded Venezuela’s welfare state while confronting the United States.

Suffering from cancer, Chavez chose Maduro to be interim president after his death. Maduro took office in March 2013 and the following month narrowly won the presidential election that had to be organized after his mentor died.

Maduro was re-elected in 2018 in a contest widely viewed as a sham. His government banned Venezuela’s most popular opposition parties and politicians from running, and the opposition in turn urged voters to boycott the election.

That authoritarian bent was part of the arguments the United States used to impose economic sanctions, which paralyzed the country’s crucial oil industry.

Maduro held two events on Thursday, including a march in Caracas, marking the official start of his campaign.

Who will vote?

More than 21 million Venezuelans are registered to vote, but the exodus of more than 7.7 million people due to the prolonged crisis — including some 4 million voters — is expected to reduce the number of potential voters to about 17 million.

Voting is not mandatory and is carried out using electronic machines.

Venezuelan law allows its citizens to vote abroad, but only about 69,000 met the criteria to cast ballots at embassies or consulates during this election. Costly and time-consuming government registration requirements, lack of information, and mandatory proof of legal residency in a host country prevented many migrants from registering to vote.

Venezuelans in the United States face an insurmountable obstacle: Consulates, where citizens abroad would normally vote, are closed because Caracas and Washington broke diplomatic relations after Maduro was re-elected in 2018.

Under what conditions do elections take place?

Freer and fair presidential elections in Venezuela seemed a possibility last year, when Maduro’s government agreed to work with the U.S.-backed Unitary Platform coalition to improve electoral conditions in October 2023. An agreement on those conditions earned Maduro’s government broad relief from Washington’s economic sanctions on its state-controlled oil, gas and mining sectors.

But hopes for a more level playing field began to fade days later, when authorities declared the opposition primaries illegal and then began issuing court orders and arresting human rights defenders, journalists and opposition members.

A UN-backed panel investigating human rights violations in Venezuela has found that the Venezuelan government has stepped up repression against critics and opponents ahead of elections, subjecting them to arrests, surveillance, threats, smear campaigns and arbitrary criminal proceedings.

The government has also used its control of the country’s media, fuel supply, electricity grid and other infrastructure to limit the reach of the Machado-González campaign.

The escalating actions against the opposition prompted the administration of US President Joe Biden this year to end sanctions relief it had granted in October.