Presidential elections were held in Venezuela over the weekend, with official results showing Nicolas Maduro once again in first place for the third time since 2013. The opposition, along with much of the international community, has disputed the fairness of the election results. The streets of Caracas have been flooded with disgruntled Venezuelans. The protests have escalated into violence, with media reports claiming that sixteen people have already been killed in clashes with police and the military, and nearly 750 protesters have been arrested.
The election result has generated significant international tension. Several international organizations have called on the Venezuelan authorities to release the voting records of individual polling stations. Argentina has refused to recognize the election results, prompting Venezuela to recall its diplomats from Buenos Aires and other Latin American countries that disputed the governing party victory.
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— World Crisis Tracker (@WorldCrisi19621) July 29, 2024
Huge protests in Caracas, Venezuela; Millions of people have taken to the streets all over the country to protest against maduro.#VenezuelaVOTA #VenezuelaElige #VenezuelaDecide2024 #Venezuela pic.twitter.com/nr0hwuMm5g
On Tuesday US President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stated in a joint announcement that they agreed the Venezuelan government must quickly publish the vote tallies of Sunday’s contested election to end the crisis. Washington also left the door open for fresh sanctions against the OPEC country.
Even though Venezuela is not exactly ‘in the neighbourhood,’ the tensions generated by the election results are also being felt within the European Union. Certain liberal circles are using this situation
to further fuel conflict between Brussels and Hungary.
Liberal mouthpiece POLITICO reported that the EU wanted to issue a statement condemning the results of the Venezuelan elections but Hungary blocked it. Brussels would also introduce sanctions against Venezuela, according to German MEP Konstantin Kuhle, Vice-Chairman of the Andean Parliamentary Group in the European Parliament. ‘The EU must consider tougher sanctions against the Venezuelan leadership. This applies in particular to Venezuela’s military apparatus, which protects the dictator,’ Kuhle emphasized.
‘Sanctions can only be adopted unanimously by EU states—but at the moment, the 27 members cannot even agree on a critical statement on Venezuela: Hungary is blocking, as we have learned from Brussels,’ writes POLITICO. ‘The fact that Hungary, of all countries, is jumping to Maduro’s side is remarkable. In Brussels, however, this is explained more by Orbán’s current EU blockade than by a sudden ideological change of heart in Budapest,’ the article continues.
But that’s not exactly what happened. In response to a request from Index, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade stated that
They explained that they first waited for the reports from Venezuela and then, after studying them, joined the common position of the European Union.
So there was no veto, nor was there any ‘sharp ideological shift’ in Budapest. In fact, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated as early as 2019 (when a crisis similar to the current one followed Maduro’s victory in the 2018 presidential elections) that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro should resign immediately and that European countries should recognize Juan Guaidó’s interim presidency.
POLITICO and its ‘anonymous sources in Brussels’ have thus attempted once again to discredit Hungary, as they have done in the past. However, in this instance, they did not succeed. A significant part of the Hungarian left-wing media quickly picked up POLITICO’s fake news, but in light of the official Hungarian position, they subsequently updated their articles on the subject.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, stated on Wednesday that the EU could not recognize Venezuela’s election result until all votes were counted and records provided, amid international concerns over the integrity of the vote. He added that the bloc will decide on possible next steps only after the full results are made available.
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