Ivan Duke called on the international community not to accept the results of future elections.
Colombian President Ivan Duque believes that the parliamentary elections to be held in Venezuela on 6 December are an imitation to legitimise the power of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. He expressed this opinion in a speech in Tumaco (Nariño West) on Thursday.
“I want to say that the imitation of the [parliamentary] elections that they [the Venezuelans] want to hold at the end of this year is just a mechanism to legitimize the dictatorship (the government of Nicolas Maduro)”, – said Duque, whose words El Tiempo quotes. The President of Colombia once again called on the international community to refuse to accept the results of future elections in a neighbouring country.
According to a decision of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council, parliamentary elections will be held in the country on 6 December. Candidate registration was organised from 10 to 19 August, and the campaign will take place from 21 November to 5 December.
The situation in Venezuela worsened when on 23 January 2019, the leader of the opposition, Juan Guaydo, whose appointment as Speaker of Parliament had been annulled by the Supreme Court two days earlier, declared himself Acting President. He was recognised as interim head of state by the USA and joined by the Lima Group countries (excluding Mexico), the Organisation of American States and most of the European Union. Maduro called it a coup attempt and announced that he had broken off diplomatic relations with the USA. Russia, Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria and Turkey spoke in favour of the coup attempt.