Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares on Monday called on Venezuela to ensure “total transparency” in the vote count after President Nicolas Maduro was re-elected in a controversial vote.
Maduro won 51.2 percent of votes, while opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia received 44.2 percent, according to official results. But the opposition coalition insists it got 70 percent of the vote.
“What we want is total transparency in the process. And that is why what we are asking for, and what we also expect, is the publication of the results voting table by voting table, so that we can verify the results,” the Spanish minister told Cadena Ser radio station.
“At the moment we have some raw figures that have been given and, as you can see, there is a division of opinion,” he added.
Since 2013, Maduro has been at the helm of the once-wealthy petro-state where GDP dropped by 80 percent in a decade, pushing more than seven million of its 30 million citizens to emigrate.
He is accused of locking up critics in the former Spanish colony and harassing the opposition in a climate of rising authoritarianism.
