Sun. May 12th, 2024

Caracas, May 21: Embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has on Monday proposed early elections for opposition Juan Guaido-led National Assembly in a bid to renew efforts to calm protesters.

The president was quoted by Al-Jazeera news as saying, “We will legitimize the sole institution which has not been legitimized in the last five years.”

In 2015, the last elections were held in which the opposition party led by Guaido had won a majority against Maduro. The next presidential elections are scheduled to take place late in 2020.

However, the president has not yet announced the exact date for his proposal of elections.

Economists have said Venezuela’s fall due to poor governance, corruption and the misguided policies of Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez is the single largest economic collapse outside of the war in 45 years, outpacing Zimbabwe’s crumbling under Robert Mugabe, Cubas disastrous unraveling in the 1990s and the fall of the Soviet Union.

And in recent months, the US President Donald Trump administration has tried to cripple it further by imposing stiff sanctions.

Maduro blames the widespread hunger and lack of medical supplies on the US and its opposition allies – but most independent economists say the recession began years before the sanctions, which at most accelerated the collapse.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But its oil output, once Latin America’s largest, has fallen faster in the past year than Iraq’s after the American invasion in 2003, according to data from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

 

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