The Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia will hold an informative breakfast in Madrid this Monday with the former president of the Spanish Government Felipe González, a few days after the Spanish Executive granted him the asylum status he had requested after his arrival in Spain on September 8th.
González Urrutia, who ran as a candidate for an opposition coalition in the Venezuelan presidential elections on July 28th, against the current president Nicolás Maduro, considers himself the winner of those elections and has shown his willingness to return to his country to assume as president even at the risk of being arrested.
Tomorrow’s meeting takes place just a few days before the inauguration ceremony of the new president, scheduled for next January 10th, in Caracas, when Maduro is preparing to take office.
The opposition maintains that González Urrutia is the winner of the presidential elections and has shown the minutes (official records) that would confirm his victory to the Venezuelan electoral authority, which nevertheless declared Nicolás Maduro’s victory without publishing any documentation to prove it.
Felipe González, socialist president of the Spanish Government from 1982 to 1996, has shown on several occasions his support for the Venezuelan opposition leader, whom he refers to as “president-elect,” and with whom he met last September, a few days after arriving in Madrid from Caracas.
Both politicians met in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1975, at the time when the former president of the Spanish Government was in hiding, in the throes of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in Spain.
Both the Spanish Congress and Senate, as well as the European Parliament and some governments, have recognized González Urrutia as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The Spanish parliamentary chambers (Las Cortes) have approved motions urging the Spanish Executive to do so.
The Venezuelan leader, who on December 17th, received the Sakharov Prize for “Freedom of Conscience”, awarded by the European Parliament in Strasbourg, went into exile in Madrid one month after competing for the presidency of Venezuela and denouncing electoral fraud in the elections last July, and from the Spanish capital he has repeatedly denounced the lack of democracy in Venezuela.
With information from EFE