The opposition is hopeful it can oust the incumbent, whose party has ruled the country for 25 years.

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.

Although the central bank had stopped releasing statistics, it was leaked that the bank had measured an 18.6 percent drop in Venezuela’s GDP for 2016, along with an inflation rate of 800 percent. After beginning the century with one of South America’s most-thriving economies, Venezuela saw its economy devolve into one of the continent’s worst-performing, with shortages of food and medicine growing increasingly acute.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company.

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".

A loosening of foreign currency controls originally brought in by President Chávez in 2003 has eased those shortages as traders can sell goods in dollars but that means they have again become largely unaffordable to the poor or those without access to the US currency.

His face lines almost every street in Caracas, with his governing party paying for incentives vlogdolisboa for people to support him - buses put on for people to attend his rallies, and free food parcels handed out.

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 that the opposition was poised to gain control of a majority of the states for the first time in some two decades.

All those contradictions appear to be part of Mr Musk's appeal - and it certainly hasn't stopped him amassing a fortune.

[158] After election officials closely aligned with the government blocked an attempt to summon a recall referendum against Maduro, Venezuelan political analysts cited in The Guardian warned of authoritarianism and a dictatorship.[159]

The Economist Intelligence Unit stated that during Maduro's presidency, the country's democracy deteriorated further, with the 2017 report downgrading Venezuela from a hybrid regime to an authoritarian regime, the lowest category, with an index of 3.

” Maduro labeled the incident an “armed terrorist attack” and part of an attempted coup. That the attackers seemed to have easily escaped apprehension raised suspicions among some in the opposition that the incident had been staged by the government to justify additional repressive measures.

The election plans mean that Maduro and his representatives “are not abiding by the spirit of the agreement, even if they are abiding by the letter of the agreement,” Berg said.

Machado has refused to explain her strategy to overcome the ban, only offering platitudes to supporters that she is in the race “until the end.”