Anti-Maduro campaign ‘stronger than ever’ after Venezuelan election, says Machado

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has insisted the campaign to end Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian rule is “stronger than ever”, but the banishing of one of its key figures to Spain has thrown many supporters off balance.

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Edmundo González, who the US and other countries have recognised as the winner of Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election, flew into exile on Sunday after several weeks holed up in the Dutch ambassador’s residence in Caracas. An arrest warrant , seemingly designed to force the retired diplomat to flee, had been issued a week earlier.

In a short statement issued from his new home in Madrid on Monday, González said he hoped his departure would help “change things” in Venezuela and usher the country into a “new phase”.

“I did it thinking of my family and of all Venezuelan families in this moment of such tension and anguish,” added González, 75, who said he had always championed democratic values.

But the message – in which some detected a valedictory tone – compounded the uncertainty which has hung over Venezuela since Maduro claimed victory in July’s election without offering proof .

Machado, a popular opposition leader whose shoes González agreed to fill in the election after she was banned from running, sought to dispel such apprehension on Monday.

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“In my opinion, it changes absolutely nothing,” Machado told journalists of his exile, vowing that the opposition campaign would lose none of its urgency or legitimacy.

“All of us know that Edmundo González Urrutia is Venezuela’s president-elect and he will continue to be, whether he’s in Venezuela or any other part of the world,” she said, claiming the opposition was now stronger than ever while Maduro’s regime was weaker and more isolated.

Experts agreed that González’s departure would have little direct impact on the opposition campaign, given that he had effectively been in hiding since a few days after the election. While Machado was able to successfully transfer her considerable political capital to González before the vote, he was previously a little-known figure who had not been involved in frontline politics.

“It is a psychological blow and of course in politics, psychological blows are important and the government is treating this as a great triumph. They’re mocking the opposition in very cruel terms,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based Venezuela expert for the International Crisis Group.

More troubling for the opposition, Gunson believed, was the absence of a clear strategy that could help them build on their remarkable electoral triumph against Maduro’s authoritarian regime, which came against all the odds.

“I don’t know if that strategy exists but it’s certainly not visible to anybody outside the immediate circle of María Corina Machado and that, to me, is more worrying than whether Edmundo is in the Dutch ambassador’s residence or whether he’s in Madrid,” Gunson said.