The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, said yesterday that it would not be ‘responsible’ to recognise the victory of the opposition candidate Edmundo González in the presidential elections in Venezuela on 28 July without all the results having been published and verified, as the PP is demanding.
In an interview on Cadena Ser, Albares assured that the Government has maintained a clear position from the outset: ‘We are not going to recognise any electoral result if the minutes of all the polling stations are not displayed and can be verified by the opposition and independent bodies’.
The minister insisted that Spain cannot ‘recognise figures that nobody knows where they come from’, in reference to Maduro’s victory promulgated by the National Electoral Council (CNE) and ratified last week by the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), and even more so when ‘what we could call doubts from the first moments begin to be more than doubts’ following the report by the UN panel of experts that observed the elections.
Asked whether the government is willing to recognise González’s victory, as the PP is demanding, Albares said that both Spain and its European partners are currently focused on ‘promoting negotiation and dialogue between the government and the opposition so that the democratic will of the Venezuelan people’, which was expressed at the ballot box on 28 July, is respected.
The minister recalled the precedent of Juan Guaidó, president of the National Assembly who was recognised as president-in-charge of Venezuela in 2019, and said that this recognition ‘did not advance the democratic will’ of Venezuelans.
Therefore, he said, ‘we have to be very responsible in what we do’. ‘It is not about making forceful statements, but effective statements, effective movements’, he stressed, framing the efforts being made by the government, and himself, to “build bridges and facilitate dialogue” between the executive and the opposition.
Open door to new sanctions
Albares left the door open to the adoption of new sanctions against Venezuela in the event that Maduro does not agree to publish the electoral records, but did not want to talk about deadlines. ‘We will consider any measure that can help the democratic will to triumph,’ he said.
‘I don’t rule out anything’, he admitted, although he made it clear that the current objective is to try to ensure that “the solution is peaceful and negotiated, that it is not a violent solution, which is why I am calling for calm and civility, and that it is not a solution that is imposed from outside”.
The Minister accused the PP of ‘irresponsibility’ and denied that the Government has been silent as the Popular Party claims, because, he said, Spain was the first European country to demand the full publication of the electoral records in order to recognise the result in Venezuela.
‘This is not a contest to see who looks better or who goes further in their statements’, he pointed out, while assuring that he could make “grandiloquent statements” that would calm the “populares” but he does not do so. In Albares’ opinion, the PP “is not thinking at any time about the Venezuelans, nor of course about Venezuela”, but rather “what they are thinking about is trying to wear down the government, whatever it takes”.
‘If the PP listened to the (Venezuelan) opposition, they would see that what they are asking for is mediators, people who are capable of talking to the government and the opposition, as I do, because the Partido Popular does not talk to anyone,’ he added. Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party, according to the minister, are only seeking to ‘continue with a campaign of hoaxes’.
As for the role played by former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, much criticised by the Popular Party, Albares reiterated that the government ‘values and appreciates’ the work he has been doing for years ‘on his own behalf’ and that he has also been thanked by both the government and the Venezuelan opposition. ‘He played an important role in the release of many political prisoners’, he defended.
Finally, the head of diplomacy avoided answering the question of whether he considers what is happening in Venezuela at the moment to be a dictatorship. ‘We are not here to act as political scientists’, he replied, but “to achieve objectives”, which in the case of the Spanish government is to talk to both Maduro and the opposition.
The PP spokesman, Borja Samper, lashed out in a press conference against Albares for putting ‘hot air’ on the situation in Venezuela and compared the position ‘of silence or a shameful and calculated equidistance’ of the Executive with that of the President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, of whom he said that, being ‘a Latin American left-wing leader’ he has ‘expressed himself with meridian forcefulness in relation to the fraud’ in Venezuela.
