Venezuela’s electoral council, stacked with officials loyal to the autocrat Nicolás Maduro, claimed late Sunday that his party had won an overwhelming victory in regional and legislative elections.
No independent vote monitors were present, and critics called the election a performance designed to rubber-stamp a government approved by Maduro.
The results, announced on state television and presented without evidence, stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held, including the governor’s seat of Zulia, the country’s most-populous state, and the heart of its oil wealth.
Despite near-empty streets and polling places, the electoral council claimed that turnout was higher than 40%. The electoral council did not post the results online, as it had done in elections before 2024.
Benigno Alarcón, a political scientist with the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said the vote lacked the minimum requirements to count as democratic.
The announcement comes less than a year after a presidential election in which Maduro also claimed victory, despite a vote count that showed that he had lost decisively to his opponent, Edmundo González. That tally was found to be accurate by the Carter Center, an independent monitoring group, which said Maduro’s claim was a “falsification.”
Speaking on state television Sunday night, the vice president of the electoral body, Carlos Quintero, said that an alliance of parties that support Maduro had won more than 80% of votes cast for legislative seats. The same coalition had won governors’ seats in 22 of the country’s 23 states, Quintero said.
Previously, four states had been held by governors not aligned with the government. Now, just one, Cojedes, in central Venezuela, will be controlled by a dissenting voice.
The voting took place amid a bitter fight among opposition leaders about whether to participate in the vote.
The country’s most prominent opposition leader, María Corina Machado, a former legislator who had backed González in the presidential race last year, had called for people to abstain, saying that the government should recognize the result of the July 2024 election.
“Empty the streets!” she told her supporters in a message before the vote.
But a cluster of others, including two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, called for candidates to run and people to cast ballots, saying that the election — even if it was ultimately stolen — could be used to rally and energize the opposition for the next fight.
“I don’t understand how staying at home, staying at home in silence, we’re going to defeat the Maduro government,” he said in an interview before the election.
In the end, abstention — or at least disillusionment — appeared to win. The streets of Caracas and major cities like Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia state, were eerily quiet Sunday, and polling stations were sparsely populated.
At Andrés Bello High School, the largest polling station in Caracas, only 793 of the 11,542 registered voters had cast their ballots by noon, one worker said.
The situation was similar in the working-class neighborhoods of La Vega and Petare — traditional strongholds for Maduro’s party — and at Capriles’ voting center, in the wealthy Caracas neighborhood of Las Mercedes, a bastion for the opposition. By midday at his polling station in Las Mercedes, just 115 of 4,788 voters had voted, according to a poll worker.
Across the country, Zulia had been one of few places still run by someone not aligned with the government — in this case Manuel Rosales, a three-time governor who had previously been viewed as more amicable with the government than other opposition politicians.
Alberto Méndez, 35, said that he come out to vote specifically to try to keep Rosales in office.
“I can’t understand why people aren’t voting,” he said. In supermarkets, pharmacies and even fast food stands, there were only employees, he explained, no customers.
“This isn’t normal. It’s as if no one here wants to fight for anything anymore, as if we’ve all given up.”
Before the results were announced, Machado, pointing to the abstention rate, called the day a success.
“Today, we Venezuelans once again defeated this criminal regime,” she said in a video message. “Since no one wants to go down in that sinking ship,” she said of the Maduro government, “the few that remain today are abandoning them.”
Quintero of the electoral council said that Capriles, the former presidential candidate, won the position he had campaigned for — a seat in the legislature.
On Sunday, Venezuelans had also been asked to vote for a governor and legislators to represent Essequibo — an oil-rich region that is recognized internationally as a part of neighboring Guyana.
Maduro has claimed the region for Venezuela, using a long-standing border dispute to try to stoke national pride. A governor was chosen, said Quintero: Neil Villamizar, a navy admiral who is a member of Maduro’s party.
For years, the government of Maduro has shaped elections in its favor, turning them into tools to rally support and barring popular opposition candidates, often turning them against each other by qualifying some to participate and not others.
But in so boldly falsifying the results last year, Maduro went further. Protests followed but were quickly crushed by security forces. Since then, hundreds of people have been locked up, including protesters, poll workers, journalists and activists.
Machado has accused Maduro and his cohort of lashing out at the population because they fear losing power and has said that the only tool they have left to stay in control is violence.
There are more than 900 political prisoners in government custody, according to a watchdog group, Foro Penal, including dozens who were detained Friday.
The decision to vote or not had even divided families.
In Zulia, Juan Bautista Casanova, 60, a university professor, arrived at his polling place without his wife, who had declared that she would be abstain. (He was without his three daughters, too, he explained — they had migrated.)
“My wife says they’ll cheat anyway, that Maduro wants to declare a dictatorship now,” Bautista said. “I told her to vote, because if that’s what happens, it might be the last time we’ll have the right to vote in Venezuela.”
In Caracas on Sunday, tanks lined the entrances to poorer neighborhoods that had been the scenes of protest the year before. Some of the vehicles bore a message: “Doubt is treason.”
On state television throughout the day, newscasters and officials spoke of high turnout, and a peaceful and efficient process. The hashtag #elpueblodecide2025 (“the people decide 2025”) flashed on screens.
Maduro’s movement, called Chavismo, has been in power for a quarter century; this was its 32nd election.
“Venezuela is the country with the most free, sovereign and democratic elections in the last 100 years of humanity,” Maduro claimed to reporters Sunday before the results were announced. The vote had been uneventful, he said, pulled off without “a single punch.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
