With less than three months left for the presidential elections in Venezuela, the main opposition coalition unanimously agreed to declare diplomat
Edmundo González Urrutia
its definitive and unitary candidate for the elections, in which President Nicolás Maduro aspires to a third term.
By unanimity of the 10 member parties, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) approved the candidacy of González Urrutia after a "
respectful
" debate, Omar Barboza, executive secretary of the Platform, told the press.
The election of González Urrutia was possible thanks to what Barboza described as “the detachment of many people,” among them the governor of the state of Zulia, Manuel Rosales, who declined his candidacy for the Un Nuevo Tiempo party, which is part of the PUD and was founded by him.
The announcement of the new candidate came after a meeting between the main heads of the opposition bloc: Rosales and opposition leader María Corina Machado.
The latter could not formally run, despite having been elected in the primaries that she won with a large majority in October, given the disqualification from holding public office for 15 years imposed on her by the State Comptroller's Office, controlled by the ruling party, just after she announced their participation in the electoral contest.
González Urrutia,
74 years old
, is a career diplomat and during his career abroad he was ambassador to Algeria and Argentina until 2002, during the presidency of Hugo Chávez.
There is not much more public information about his life, except that he was president of the MUD party, acronym for the Democratic Unity Roundtable, later replaced by the PUD, and he was an advisor in the only major opposition electoral victory in the 2015 legislative elections.
The new candidate has never competed for elective office, and being the center of a campaign like the presidential one will be something new for him. His
silence and discretion contrast with a noisy Chavismo and a belligerent Maduro
, whose image is praised on state television, highways, airports and social networks like TikTok.
"González is
the antithesis of Chavismo, Madurismo and the traditional politician
. He is a cultured, honest, familiar man, without duplicity and without a hint of populism," wrote analyst José Toro Hardy.
"Edmundo González's greatest asset is his lack of knowledge (among the population), because it implies a very low level of rejection and a lot of possibility of growth in the face of rejection (in surveys) of Maduro," said Omar Vásquez Heredia, a doctor in political science and researcher.
The novel of the election of the PUD candidate began to be defined in the early hours of March 26, hours after the deadline set for registering applicants. In view of the impossibility of registering Machado, as well as his replacement Corina Yoris - an impossibility, the latter never explained -, the opposition bloc ended up provisionally registering González with the aim of staying in the electoral race.
The representatives of the Platform “chose Ambassador Edmundo González as the candidate of the Venezuelans. We celebrate this decision and thank Venezuelans for their trust,” the Vente Venezuela party, founded by Machado and which is not part of the opposition bloc, said on social networks, without giving other details.
González Urrutia, former Venezuelan ambassador to Argentina (1999-2002), was “originally registered as a provisional candidate and today he becomes a definitive candidate. He is already registered and his registration was admitted by the National Electoral Council and was not objected to by anyone,” Barboza emphasized.