In some places, monitors were barred from entering polling places or they never appeared in the first place. Often, election officials simply refused to hand over the tallies.

On the streets of some of Brazil’s biggest cities on Sunday night, many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters responded to the results with claims of fraud — and then a swift exit.

The bitterly fought election went into a run-off on 30 October and was won by an extremely narrow margin by Lula.

Those talks initially bore fruit, with the cessation of street protests and the Maduro government’s release of a handful of jailed activists. By December, however, the talks had broken down, as Maduro dragged his feet on releasing dozens of other political prisoners and refused to allow the delivery of foreign humanitarian aid, which would have signaled official acknowledgement that the country was in crisis.

The US State Department issued a fact sheet stating that Maduro's most serious corruption involved embezzlement in which "a European bank accepted exorbitant commissions to process approximately $2 billion in transactions related to Venezuelan third–party money launderers, shell companies, and complex financial products to siphon off funds from PdVSA".

In his victory speech, he referenced US sanctions imposed after the last elections were seen as unfair.

Still, the widespread demonstrations that many had feared could quickly follow the election results did not occur. Instead, in dozens of groups on the messaging app Telegram, many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters appeared disjointed and in disagreement over how to respond to the president’s election loss, particularly without a response from the president himself.

Originally scheduled for December 2016 but postponed by the election commission, gubernatorial elections were held in Venezuela’s 23 states in mid-October 2017. Preelection preference polling had indicated vlogdolisboa that the opposition was poised to gain control of a majority of the states for the first time in some two decades.

The results announced by the government-controlled electoral council varied wildly — by up to 30 percentage points — from most public polls and from the opposition’s sample of results obtained directly from voting centers. And there were many reports of major irregularities and problems at those voting centers.

The government’s announcement that Mr. Maduro had beaten his opponent, Edmundo González, by seven percentage points instantly created a grim scenario for a country that only recently has started emerging from one of the largest economic collapses in modern history.

"But it is also clear that the competing priorities for global attention - Ukraine, famine in East Africa, trauma in Afghanistan - are draining attention in a way that is quite dangerous."

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.

Despite international scepticism of the results, supporters of President Maduro took to the streets to celebrate

More recent business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.