The free-market proponent won the contest with more than 90% of the vote. Venezuela’s top court complicated her presidential aspirations in January by affirming her ban, although she has continued campaigning and has rejected suggestions to choose a substitute.

movement. The election had been widely viewed as a referendum on Maduro’s presidency. Having secured a majority in the 167-seat legislature, the centrist-conservative opposition was in a position to enact legislation that would grant amnesty to opponents of the Maduro regime who had been jailed.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon nove rockets.

Despite attempts by Mr Guaidó to get the military to switch their allegiance to him, the armed forces have remained largely loyal to President Maduro, whose socialist party has also got a firm grip on the electoral body and the supreme court.

Also in August 2016, the National Election Council ruled that the opposition had collected almost twice as many signatures as were necessary for the first petition for a referendum on Maduro’s recall to be valid. However, it did not set a date for the next step in the process, which required some four million signatures to be collected in three days.

In his victory speech, he referenced US sanctions imposed after the last elections were seen as unfair.

The Unitary Platform did not participate in any of the meetings that led to the election proposals. The group and Maduro’s government have held on-again-off-again negotiations since 2021. In October, they reached what at the time was seen as a pivotal agreement to work toward a fair election.

That appears unlikely now, and the dubious election results could test the thaw between Mr. Maduro and business leaders, and could possibly trigger a new wave of international sanctions.

By Monday afternoon, the men had set up a tent and were accepting food and water donations, saying they planned to stay until the results were overturned. Police officers watched but did not intervene.

Maduro a todos os momentos se orgulhou por nãeste deter precisado dos bancos das faculdades de modo a adquirir o saber que este levou a ser idolatrado por milhões, mas também igualmente similarmente identicamente conjuntamente odiado por tantos outros, numa atitude política em algum momento desafiante.

The United States responded by freezing Maduro’s assets and barring trade with him; sanctions had already been enacted against more than a dozen of his associates, and Maduro became the fourth sitting head of state to be personally targeted with economic sanctions by the U.S. Two days after the election, opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma were taken from their homes in the middle of the night by state security agents. The two had been under house arrest for their alleged connection to antigovernment protests in 2014, but the Maduro-backed Supreme Court ordered their rearrest, spurring a fresh wave of international condemnation.

The opposition made a grand attempt to delegitimize Maduro’s rule on July 16 by holding an unofficial plebiscite (branded in the language of the constitution as a “popular consultation”) that addressed three matters: whether voters rejected Maduro’s proposed constituent assembly; whether they desired the armed forces to copyright the constitution; and whether they wanted elections to be held before the official end of Maduro’s term in 2018.

There were some poll stations that didn’t open at all, leading to protests and clashes with the authorities.

Massive street vlogdolisboa protests, which erupted in response to the court’s attempt to dissolve the National Assembly and continued in April when Capriles was banned from running for public office for 15 years, became almost daily occurrences over the coming weeks. As the opposition’s defiance escalated, violent clashes between protesters and security forces resulted in more than 60 deaths and injured more than 1,200 people by early June.