Venezuelan parliament to weigh establishment of new election board

Caracas, Jan 9 (EFE).- The head of Venezuela’s National Assembly (AN), the country’s legislature, Jorge Rodriguez, said Monday that he will consider the proposal made by various opposition sectors to name a new board of directors for the National Electoral Council (CNE), with an eye toward the country’s 2024 presidential election.

“In the round of talks that President (Nicolas) Maduro embarked upon with different sectors of the Venezuelan opposition … in some of these conversations, not just a few, the suggestion to create a new CNE came up,” Rodriguez said at a press conference at the parliament in Caracas.

He added that the AN, which has the constitutional authority to name a new CNE board of directors, is participating along with Maduro in these talks, and they will consider “calmly and closely” this proposal by the opposition.

In early December, the president of the anti-Chavista Alianza Lapiz party, Antonio Ecarri, asked Maduro to hold a meeting with the CNE to create “institutional certainty and to set a date for elections according to the schedule established by the Constitution.”

Meanwhile, David Uzcategui, a member of the Fuerza Vecinal party, asked the president about the possibility for Venezuelan migrants to have the “opportunity and the constitutional right” to vote in the presidential elections.

In May 2021, the AN – which has a majority that backs Maduro – appointed five new CNE board members for seven-year terms, three of them allied with the governing Chavismo movement and two from the opposition.

The appointments led to having a European Union Election Observer Mission (MOE-UE) sent to monitor the regional and local elections held in that year, the first such team sent to Venezuela by the European bloc in 15 years.

After those elections, the MOE-UE recommended, among other things, strengthening the “separation of powers and the confidence in the independence” of Venezuela’s Supreme Court (TSJ), as well as strengthening the “CNE’s sanctioning powers by introducing a system of monitoring and sanctions.”

EFE –/bp