By Tara John, CNN
(CNN) — Venezuelans headed to the polls on Sunday to vote in a highly consequential presidential election where the country’s longtime strongman, Nicolas Maduro, will face one of his greatest political challenges yet, say analysts.
Maduro, who took the mantle of the ruling Chavismo movement after his predecessor Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013, is seeking his third consecutive six-year term in office. Of the nine other candidates running for the presidency, his biggest challenger is a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions to form a coalition known as the Democratic Unitary Platform.
The opposition movement has maintained its momentum despite sustained government repression, in which their first-choice candidate, María Corina Machado, was disqualified from running. Machado, an avowed capitalist who has promised privatization of several state industries, has since rallied for her replacement, the soft-spoken former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia.
Punishing sanctions on the regime by the United States and European Union have failed to topple the populist incumbent, who argues that Venezuela’s woes are due to being a victim of an “economic war.”
Around eight million Venezuelans have fled the country amid shortages of vital goods and soaring inflation.
There has been mounting concern that the opposition will not see a fair contest as Maduro’s government controls all public institutions in Venezuela and has been accused of rigging previous votes, which it denied. Experts note, however, that concerns of vote tampering may be mitigated by the planned presence of opposition party representatives at each polling station.
The election campaign has seen at least 71 people arbitrarily detained – the majority of whom provided some sort of service to the opposition – and a dozen online media outlets blocked within the country, according to human rights organization Laboratorio de Paz.
The government has also created significant impediments for the millions of Venezuelans abroad to vote, including widely unattainable passport and residency requirements.
A limited group of election observers, including a team from The Carter Center – a non-profit organization set up by former US President Jimmy Carter – will be on the ground. But several international election observers have announced this week that they will no longer travel to Venezuela to monitor the vote.
How the army reacts to the outcome could be an important factor in any scenario, but analysts say it impossible to parse where it stands.
“The military is absolutely key. But I must also say that the military is very hermetic, [and] it is very difficult to access information about what it is thinking,” Laura Cristina Dib, the Venezuela Program Director of Venezuela Program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told CNN.
Polls will close at 6 p.m ET.
With reporting from CNN’s Stefano Pozzebon, David Shortell and Michael Rios.
The-CNN-Wire
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