CARACAS – Venezuelans have taken to the streets of Caracas after the electoral authority officially declared President Nicolas Maduro the winner of an election that the opposition says was marred by fraud.

The Associated Press and AFP news agencies reported on Monday afternoon that demonstrations broke out near the capital’s largest poor neighbourhood to protest Maduro’s victory in Sunday’s vote. In the Petare area, demonstrators shouted slogans against the president, and some masked young people tore down his campaign posters from lampposts. Police were deployed in large numbers, and members of the National Guard were seen to be firing tear gas to disperse demonstrators.

“It’s going to fall. It’s going to fall. This government is going fall!” some of the protesters shouted. Public anger has swelled after the National Electoral Council (CNE) on Monday formally confirmed that Maduro had been re-elected by a majority of Venezuelans to another six-year term as president “for the period 2025-2031”.

But the CNE, which is controlled by Maduro loyalists, has not released the tallies from each of the 30,000 polling stations across Venezuela, fuelling political tensions in the South American nation and calls for greater transparency. Opposition representatives said earlier that the counts they collected from campaign representatives at the centres had shown opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trouncing Maduro.

The CNE said Gonzalez had failed to defeat the president, earning 44 percent of the votes compared with Maduro’s 51 percent. Speaking in a televised address from Caracas on Monday, Maduro, 61, claimed, without providing evidence, that “an attempt is being made to impose a coup d’etat in Venezuela”. “We already know this movie, and this time, there will be no kind of weakness,” he added, saying Venezuela’s “law will be respected”. (Al Jazeera)…[+]