MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula's gov't not congratulating Maduro for now

Brazil will play it nice and slow before congratulating any winner

While many governments in the region said they were doubting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's reelection on Sunday, the Brazilian administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reaffirmed the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty and said it would wait for the release of all the minutes before congratulations are in order, Agencia Brasil reported.

The Itamaraty Palace said in a statement Monday that it was awaiting the publication by the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) of data regarding each polling station, “an indispensable step for the transparency, credibility, and legitimacy of the elections' results.”

Brazil “also reaffirms the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, to be observed through impartial verification of the results,” the Foreign Ministry's document went on. “The Brazilian government welcomes the peaceful nature of yesterday's [Sunday's] elections in Venezuela and is following the counting process closely,” it added.

Brazil was represented Sunday in Caracas by Presidential Advisor Celso Amorim, a former Foreign Minister and key aide to Lula regarding international affairs.

The Venezuelan National Electoral Council is expected to publish the detailed results shortly, which will make it possible to verify whether the minutes in the hands of the CNE are the same as those printed at the time of the vote and distributed to the opposition's inspectors or to national and international observers.

Although the CNE announced Nicolás Maduro's victory by 51.21% of the votes with 80% of the ballots counted, the opposition led by candidate Edmundo González Urrutia did not recognize the result. Opposition leader María Corina Machado said González Urrutia had defeated Maduro by a wide margin.

World leaders are split between those not recognizing the results, such as Ecuador's Daniel Noboa and Argentina's Javier Milei; those who are not unaware of the result, but are calling for the publication of the minutes, such as Colombia, the United States, the European Union, and Brazil; and those who congratulated Maduro on his victory, such as Russia, Bolivia, China and Cuba.

Maduro called on all foreign powers to respect Sunday's outcome. “The electoral power has an electoral system of the highest level of trust, security, and transparency with 16 audits,” he assured, adding that ”When there was a debate in which Donald Trump denounced that the elections in the United States had been stolen from him, we didn't get involved in that, did we?”

Questioned by the opposition since at least 2004, the results of the Venezuelan elections are often distrusted by the international community. However, in recent elections, international organizations such as the Carter Center and the European Union Observation Mission have not cried fraud and complaints of improprieties in past elections have not been formalized.