Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González landed in Madrid on Sunday afternoon on an armed forces plane to seek political asylum in Spain. The announcement of his departure from Venezuela, a few hours earlier, sparked a new clash between the Spanish government and the main opposition party, which, despite having recently claimed political protection, considers that the arrival of the former Venezuelan candidate without the status of elected president – the only available records, published by the opposition, grant him victory – is a favor to the regime of Nicolas Maduro. “Today, Maduro is much happier than yesterday,” said the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
In recent hours, critical messages about the position of the Executive have been launched from the popular ranks. This Monday, in an interview with ‘Espejo Público’, the PP president admitted that he would also have granted political asylum to the Venezuelan opponent, but with the treatment of the elected president. With his arrival in Spain without this condition “Maduro won and Venezuelan democracy lost“, Feijóo considered. “Maduro managed to keep the leader who won the elections out of the country,” he stressed.
This is the same position that other popular leaders have been defending since yesterday. The vice-secretary for Institutional Affairs of the PP, Esteban González Pons, questioned the fact that granting asylum “does not serve democracy, but on the contrary eliminates a problem of the dictatorship”, while Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, in the same sense, reproaches the A government that “wins medals for having brought the wrong man to Spain”. A position that the Executive has described as contradictory and incoherent, but that the leader of the popular parties has also defended.
Specifically, Núñez Feijóo explained that in addition to granting political asylum to the now exiled opponent, he had granted him the position of president-elect and would have supported the complaint of thirty former Latin American presidents, including Felipe González, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, against Maduro before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “widespread and systematic violations of human rights.” José Luis Rodriguez Zapaterowhose role in Venezuela has been widely criticized by the Spanish opposition, is the only former Spanish president not to have signed the report.
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