Former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is on track to hold free and fair elections in the South American country. The praise refers to the referendum on the annexation of Essequibo held in Venezuela in December 2023, which had a printed vote. The statement came during a live broadcast early in the evening of this Sunday (January 28), in which Bolsonaro and his three parliamentary sons called on Bolsonaro activists to support candidates allied with the PL in the local elections.
For Bolsonaro, the neighboring country took the first step towards a clean election by holding a referendum, promoted by the government of Nicolás Maduro, to annex the territory of Essequibo, currently part of the territory of Guyana but disputed between both countries for more than 100 years.
“The opposition and Nicolás Maduro have decided to work together so that American sanctions can be eased in exchange for free and fair elections in Venezuela. Part of it has already been put into practice, in this referendum that we saw a few weeks ago and that was initiated by President Maduro. In this referendum, the vote was printed out next to the electronic ballot box.”
The former president once again indirectly attacked Brazil's electronic voting system and praised the Venezuelan dictator's government's use of printed votes.
“In the video they provided, Maduro goes to vote, there were five votes and he said something and pressed a button, and then he pressed another button and printed out the vote. He took that vote and when he went to the ballot box, he said, “Here we have electronic voting, but unlike other countries, we also have paper voting,” without mentioning which country it was, and cast the vote into the ballot box. In other words, he began to demonstrate fair elections in response to the opposition. Of course, we are still missing the public counting of votes,” said Bolsonaro.
After praising the holding of the plebiscite that put the entire subcontinent on alert about the risk of conflict between Brazil's two neighbors, Bolsonaro criticized the Venezuelan court decision that barred the country's main opposition leader from the vote. “In Venezuela, clean elections, no one argues, but without opposition, Corina (María Corina Machado) is ineligible for 15 years and Capriles (Henrique Capriles Radonski) is also ineligible for 15 years,” Bolsonaro said.
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