US recognizes Edmundo González as ‘president-elect’ of Venezuela

The United States has for the first time recognized Edmundo González, the opposition candidate, as Venezuela’s president-elect following the presidential election of July 28. Washington had already declared González the winner on August 1. “The Venezuelan people spoke resoundingly on July 28 and made Edmundo González the president-elect. Democracy demands respect for the will of the voters,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote on social media.

It is the first time that the U.S. has described González as Venezuela’s president-elect. The change comes two months before Nicolás Maduro’s new term is due to begin on January 10, which will be followed by the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on January 20. It also comes just after the end of the G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, attended by outgoing President Joe Biden and Blinken himself.

The Venezuelan opposition leader expressed his gratitude for the recognition on the same social platform just minutes after Blinken’s message. “This gesture honors the desire for change of our people and the civic gesture that we carried out together on July 28,” he posted in X.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner, but since then it has not published the vote tallies with the disaggregated results, in spite of calls from the United States, the European Union and Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia to do so. The main Venezuelan opposition coalition, the Plataforma Unitaria Democrática (PUD), released the results of the election online, and these tallies show González as the winner, with more than twice as many votes as Maduro.

The former diplomat has been in exile in Spain since September. He took refuge there after denouncing persecution by Venezuelan authorities: the Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office had opened an investigation against him and an arrest warrant had been issued for him after the PUD released the vote tallies online. Opposition leader María Corina Machado has also been in hiding since then. Despite his departure, González maintains that he is the real winner of the election.

Trump has proposed as his Secretary of State the current Florida senator Marco Rubio, considered a hawk towards the authoritarian regime in Venezuela. In August, after the elections in that country Rubio criticized the partial lifting of sanctions that the Biden Administration had approved months earlier to encourage free elections. “The ‘strategies’ presented by this administration have done nothing but empower narco-dictator Maduro and his thugs [...] Any negotiations are a continued lifeline to the narco-regime,” Rubio said in a statement.

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