Venezuela holds another flawed election

“THIS only happens in Venezuela,” boasted Nicolás Maduro as the electoral commission declared the results of a long-delayed regional election on October 15th. For once, the country’s president (pictured, with moustache) may have been right. In the midst of an economic calamity largely of his own making, with opinion polls showing support among Venezuelans for his government at less than 30%, his United Socialist Party (PSUV) won 18 out of 23 governorships and more than half the national vote.

“Neither Venezuelans nor the world will swallow this fiction,” declared Gerardo Blyde, the campaign director of the opposition Democratic Unity coalition (MUD). The electoral commission, which takes its orders from Mr Maduro’s regime, has published fiction before, most recently in July, when it claimed that more than 8m people voted to select members of a “constituent assembly”, a sham parliament designed to bypass the opposition-controlled national assembly. The commission exaggerated the turnout by at least 1m people.