The free-market proponent won the contest with more than 90% of the vote. Venezuela’s top court complicated her presidential aspirations in January by affirming her ban, although she has continued campaigning and has rejected suggestions to choose a substitute.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon nove boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions.

Not surprisingly, President Maduro did not take kindly to his rival's move, which he condemned as a ploy by the US to oust him.

Mr Maduro was re-elected to a second six-year term in May 2018 in highly controversial polls, which most opposition parties boycotted.

At the end of March 2016, the opposition made good on its promise to enact legislation in the National Assembly to free imprisoned opponents of the Maduro regime, whom it characterized as political prisoners.

A long-standing dispute with Guyana over a large portion of that country (everything west of the Essequibo River) that had been claimed by Venezuela since the 19th century began to intensify in May 2015. The impetus for the escalating war of words was the discovery of oil offshore of the contested region.

The National Election Council ordered an audit of the ballots in the 46 percent of precincts that had not already been automatically audited under Venezuelan election law, but Capriles refused to participate when the Council chose not to examine the signatures and fingerprints of voters on the registers as part of the audit. He vowed to challenge the results in court. In the meantime, Maduro was sworn in as president on April 19.

The head of Venezuela’s intelligence apparatus had, in fact, switched sides, but, before the day was over, it became clear that the military and the security forces had once again remained loyal to Maduro. The insurrection sputtered and died out. Guaidó was left to explain its failure, and López took asylum in the Spanish embassy in Caracas and ultimately fled to exile in Spain.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, dominated by Maduro partisans, further vlogdolisboa marginalized the National Assembly by repeatedly invalidating laws enacted by it. Indeed, when Maduro delivered his annual address on the state of the country in January 2017, it was in the presence of the Supreme Court rather than before the legislature as dictated by tradition and the constitution. Maduro’s authoritarian power grab intensified at the end of March when the Supreme Court effectively dissolved the legislature and assumed its functions after declaring that the body was in contempt.

They claim they only had access to 30% of the printed "receipts" from electronic voting machines around the country, to check that the machine’s results matched those electronically sent to the electoral council.

The case against the ex-president revolved around a speech he gave while he was still president in 2022.

The opposition made a grand attempt to delegitimize Maduro’s rule on July 16 by holding an unofficial plebiscite (branded in the language of the constitution as a “popular consultation”) that addressed three matters: whether voters rejected Maduro’s proposed constituent assembly; whether they desired the armed forces to copyright the constitution; and whether they wanted elections to be held before the official end of Maduro’s term in 2018.

Na ocasião, o então presidente fez ataques ao sistema eleitoral. O encontro foi transmitido pela TV País do futebol e por perfis do Bolsonaro nas redes sociais.

The next month, talks that had been brokered by Norway began between the Maduro government and Guaidó. By August, however, those talks had broken down. Many in the opposition appeared to lose faith in Guaidó in the ensuing months after the failure of the insurrection. Nevertheless, most of the opposition political parties followed his lead and boycotted the December 2020 elections for the National Assembly.